SILVERSTEIN

Shel Silverstein was born in 1930. He grew up in Chicago and created his first cartoons for the adult readers of the Pacific Stars and Stripes when he was a GI in Japan and Korea in the 1950s. He then became cartoonist for Playboy magazine.

Mentored by Bob Gibson, he played the guitar and began writing songs first with Gibson and then alone. He also co-wrote with friends such as Mike Settle, Pat Dailey, Dennis Morgan, Kris Kristofferson and many others, performed his own songs on a number of albums and wrote his last in 1998 Old Dogs, a two-volume set performed by country stars and friends Bobby Bare, Waylon Jennings, Mel Tillis and Jerry Reed. Many of his songs were chart hits such as “The Unicorn” (Irish Rovers), “A Boy Named Sue” (Johnny Cash), “”The Cover of the Rolling Stone”, “Sylvia’s Mother” (Dr. Hook).

Silverstein received an Oscar nomination in 1991 for the song “I’m Checkin’ Out” from the Columbia Pictures film Postcards from the Edge, wrote songs for the film Who Is Harry Kellerman and why is he saying those terrible things about me? “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan” was featured in the film Thelma and Louise.

He was also an accomplished playwright. His credits include The Lady or the Tiger and The Devil and Billy Markham, the latter produced at Lincoln Center in 1989 on a double bill with Oh Hell by David Mamet with whom he co-wrote the screenplay Things Change. A frequent showcase for Shel’s plays, the Ensemble Studio Theatre of New York produced his own version of Hamlet as well as The Trio in their annual marathon of one-act plays

Shel Silverstein will perhaps always be best loved for his children’s books including The Giving Tree, A Light in the Attic, Falling Up , Where the Sidewalk Ends, the latter also released as a Grammy award winning children’s album “recited, sung and shouted” by the author.