Shel Silverstein
Shel Silverstein is an author.
Silverstein's career reads like four careers stapled together. He was born and raised in Chicago, went briefly to college, was drafted into the Army, and came out of the 1950s as a cartoonist whose work ran in newspapers and magazines, Playboy among them. He wrote songs, and won a Grammy for country songwriting, which tends to surprise people who know him only from a school library.
The children's books are why most readers arrive, and the thing they get right is tone. Silverstein never wrote down to children and never made the mistake of being wholesome. The verse is short, metrically tight, drawn in the same nervous pen line as the cartoons, and quite often mean in a way children find hilarious and adults find alarming. A poem of his tends to stop one beat before the comforting line an ordinary children's poet would have added.
The adult work makes the same joke from the other side. Uncle Shelby's ABZ Book is an alphabet primer written as a straight-faced prank on the form, aimed squarely at grown-ups, and it is the clearest evidence that the children's books were a chosen audience rather than a natural register. He could have written either. He wrote both, and mostly at the same time.
Books (3)
Where to start with Shel Silverstein
Hand a child Falling Up, then reopen it yourself if you have not read him since school. The poems are short enough to get through standing in a bookshop, and roughly one in five is quietly savage.
A Giraffe and a Half is for the youngest readers, a cumulative rhyme that builds an absurd tower and then dismantles it, which is exactly the shape small children want a book to have.
Uncle Shelby's ABZ book is for adults, genuinely funny, and should be kept well away from the child you bought the other two for. His two most famous titles, Where the Sidewalk Ends and The Giving Tree, are not among the credits listed here.