Drawing the Line: The Giving Tree's "Adult" Lessons

Published In

Children's Literature

Document Type

Citation

Publication Date

2019

Abstract

When I was nine years old, having recently devoured Shel Silverstein's first book of children's poems, I discovered nude photos of the author in Playboy magazine. A neighbor had left a trunk full of Playboys with us (his wife objected to them), so naturally I snuck two or three of them at a time to my bedroom, where I could read them in private. I wasn't aware that "Silverstein in a Nudist Camp" was only one installment of many he wrote for Playboy, but I was struck by the similarity of the cartoons in the article to the drawings in his children's books. Several black-and-white photographs accompanied the cartoons, but the one that stuck with me was of a naked Silverstein walking down a wooded path away from the camera, flanked by women similarly unadorned, their rear ends the most prominent feature of the photo. I couldn't read Silverstein again without seeing that image.

Rights

© 2018 Hollins University

DOI

10.1353/chl.2019.0007

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/34652

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