Authors starting with S

- Shel Silverstein (September 25, 1930 - May 10, 1999) -

Ancestry: Chicago, Illinois, USA

Sheldon Alan Silverstein, better known as Shel Silverstein, was an American poet, singer-songwriter, musician, composer, cartoonist, screenwriter and author of children's books. He sometimes styled himself as Uncle Shelby, especially for his early children's books.

Born in Chicago, Silverstein began drawing as a child by tracing the works of Walt Disney, and he was also influenced by the style of gag cartoonist Virgil Partch. Silverstein was first published in the Roosevelt Torch (a student newspaper at Roosevelt University).

In the military, his cartoons were published in Pacific Stars and Stripes, where he had originally been assigned to do paste-up and composition. His first book, Take Ten, a compilation of his military cartoons, was published by Pacific Stars and Stripes.

Returning to Chicago as a civilian, Silverstein began submitting freelance cartoons to magazines while also selling hot dogs at Chicago ballparks, setting a record for the number of hot dogs sold at the Thursday night games. His cartoons began appearing in Look, Sports Illustrated and This Week.

Mass-market paperback readers across America were introduced to Silverstein in 1956 when his Army cartoons were published by Ballantine Books in Grab Your Socks! with a foreword by Bill Mauldin.

He soon became a feature cartoonist in the pages of Playboy, which sent his around the world to do an illustrated travel journal with reports from far-flung locales. During the 1950s and 1960s, he produced 23 installments of this regular feature, "Shel Silverstein Visits...", for Playboy. Employing a sketchbook format, he documented his own experiences at such locations as a New Jersey nudist colony, the White Sox training camp, San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, Fire Island, Mexico, London, Paris, Spain and Africa. In a Swiss village, he shows himself complaining, "I'll give them 15 more minutes, and if nobody yodels, I'm going back to the hotel." These illustrated travel essays were collected by the publisher Fireside in Playboy's Silverstein Around the World (2007), with a foreword by Hugh Hefner and an introduction by music journalist Mitch Myers. Silverstein's cartoons appeared in every issue of Playboy from 1957 through the mid-1970s.