Shel Silverstein

“And now children, your Uncle Shelby is going to tell you a story about a very strange lion- in fact, the strangest lion I have ever met.” So begins one of Shel Silverstein’s very first children’s books. Lafcadio, the Lion Who Shot Back. It’s funny and sad and has made readers laugh and think since it was published in 1963. I was followed the next year by three other books. The first, The Giving Tree, is a moving story about the love of a tree for a boy.
Yet Shel did not set out to write and draw for children. As he told Publishers Weekly in 1975. “When I was a kid, I would much rather have been a good baseball player or a hit with the girls. But I couldn’t play ball, I couldn’t dance, so I started to draw and write. I was lucky that I didn’t have anyone to copy, be impressed by. I had developed my own style.”
He grew up in Chicago and created cartoons for adult readers of Pacific Stars and Stripes when he was a GI in Japan and Korea in the 1950s he also learned to play guitar and to write songs including “A Boy Named Sue” for Johnny Cash and “The Covering of the Rolling Stone” sung by Dr. Hook. He performed his own songs on a number of albums and wrote others for friends.
In 1984, Silverstein won a Grammy Award® for Best Children’s Album for “Where the Sidewalk Ends” – recited, sung and shouted by the author.

- http://www.shelsilverstein.com