Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio, Hey Rain
Speaker 1: Stuff Lauren voc obam here. Decades ago, in the evenings
Speaker 1: around closing time, a man with a very bald head
Speaker 1: and a very dark beard used to come sloping into
Speaker 1: the Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, his shoulders hunched
Speaker 1: as though warding off a perpetual cold wind. The proprietor,
Speaker 1: Auto Penzler, had come to expect these visits, Indeed, he
Speaker 1: looked forward to them. He would close up the shop
Speaker 1: and guide the man back to his inner sanctum, a
Speaker 1: book line study with Florida ceiling shelves. There, the bearded
Speaker 1: man would deliver a sheaf of papers containing a new,
Speaker 1: freshly penned mystery story to be added to the anthology
Speaker 1: that Penzler was publishing. The writer refused to take any
Speaker 1: money for his efforts, even though Penzler was paying well.
Speaker 1: He craved a different compensation. His eyes gleamed as Penzler
Speaker 1: slid his payment across the desk. Between them, it was
Speaker 1: a stack of used books containing dozens of stories written
Speaker 1: in the mystery genre. Later that night he would devour
Speaker 1: them one by one, But first Penzler and the bearded
Speaker 1: man would talk and talk. They talked about books about life.
Speaker 1: Auto Pendler was just recovering from a devastating breakup, and
Speaker 1: so they spoke about that at length. In a recent
Speaker 1: phone interview for this article, Penzler remembered that at a
Speaker 1: certain juncture, his guest said something so piercingly insightful and
Speaker 1: eloquent about the breakup that it took his breath away.
Speaker 1: Penzler said, I wish that I could remember what he said,
Speaker 1: but I failed to write it down. What I do
Speaker 1: remember is that when I expressed my amazement at his
Speaker 1: facility with words, he just shrugged and said, I guess
Speaker 1: that's why they call me a poet. He could have added,
Speaker 1: among many other things, because our bald and bearded man
Speaker 1: was Shell Silverstein, a true Renaissance ban Of course, many
Speaker 1: of us know him as the author and illustrator of
Speaker 1: The Giving Tree, A Light in the Attic, and Where
Speaker 1: the Sidewalk Ends, among many of the other wildly successful
Speaker 1: books that he wrote and drew for children. But that's
Speaker 1: only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Silverstein also drew
Speaker 1: cartoons and wrote plays for adults, and penned numerous songs,
Speaker 1: especially country songs. In fact, he won two Grammys for
Speaker 1: a songwriting, one of them for the Johnny Cash hit.
Speaker 1: A boy named Sue Sheldon Allan Shell Silverstein was born
Speaker 1: into a Jewish family in Chicago in nineteen thirty. His
Speaker 1: father ran a bakery, which only began to thrive in
Speaker 1: the wake of the Great Depression. After high school, Shell
Speaker 1: spent some time studying at the Art Institute of Chicago
Speaker 1: and later at Roosevelt University, but was drafted into the U. S. Army,
Speaker 1: serving in Korea and Japan. Silverstein began working for the
Speaker 1: military periodical The Stars and Stripes, and it was there
Speaker 1: that he began regularly publishing his idiosyncratic cartoons. After his
Speaker 1: military service, Silverstein got a job as a cartoonist for
Speaker 1: the fledgling magazine Playboy. For his Playboy gig, he traveled
Speaker 1: the world, sending cartoon dispatches from bar and wide. In
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty three, Silverstein met book editor Ursula Nordstrom, who
Speaker 1: prodded him into writing books for children, and that same
Speaker 1: year he wrote The Giving Tree, a book about the
Speaker 1: nature of altruism and selfishness that would become his most
Speaker 1: famous and popular work. His sense of the absurd, and
Speaker 1: the whimsical cartoon line drawings that illustrated this and all
Speaker 1: of his books would become his hallmarks. In deceptively simple language,
Speaker 1: his exploration of the innocence and imagination of childhood made
Speaker 1: him one of the most celebrated and widely read authors
Speaker 1: for generations of children and adults alike. Otto Penzler recalls
Speaker 1: Silverstein telling him that he spent a year living at
Speaker 1: the Playboy Mansion as a guest of Hugh Hefner. It
Speaker 1: was there that he met Susan Hastings, with whom he
Speaker 1: had a daughter named Shoshanna in nineteen seventy Tragically, Susan
Speaker 1: died in nineteen seventy five, and Shoshanna passed away unexpectedly
Speaker 1: after a cerebral anneurism in nineteen eighty two. By many accounts,
Speaker 1: her death utterly devastated Silverstein. In nineteen eighty four, he
Speaker 1: had a son named Matthew with Sarah Spencer. According to Penzler,
Speaker 1: Silverstein was a deeply eccentric man. Penzler told us, for instance,
Speaker 1: it wasn't unusual for him to be having dinner in
Speaker 1: a restaurant with a group of friends and then suddenly
Speaker 1: announced that he was done, get up, take a taxi
Speaker 1: to the airport, and fly to Chicago or Los Angeles
Speaker 1: or Florida, or wherever he felt like going on the
Speaker 1: spur of the moment. Shell Silverstein died of a heart
Speaker 1: attack in at the age of just sixty eight, but
Speaker 1: in story, song, and image, he left behind a remarkably
Speaker 1: prolific artistic record. Today's episode was written by Ocean Karen
Speaker 1: and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and
Speaker 1: lots of other topics, visit how stuffworks dot com. Brain
Speaker 1: Stuff is production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts my
Speaker 1: heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
Speaker 1: wherever you listen to your favorite shows.