Authors seem to have an unnatural favoring of formalwear during interviews and professional photos. But this is not particularly surprising, as writing follows a history of formal journalism, academic essays, and deep meaningful novels. An article titled “How to Dress Like a Writer”[1] states that there are five ways that you can dress depending on your style of writing: The Desk Goblin (pajamas), The Dark Academic (preppy), The Retreatist (hikers), The Spiritual Scribe (hippies), or the Leather-Bound and Classic (preppy, but not as much). But was there ever a time where authors do not adapt a preppy outfit for their headshots or full-body interview poses?
Shel Silverstein breaks through the stereotypes of preppy outfits of the 1960s and 70s. His scribbly bare-line artwork and children’s poems that he is known for reminds you of an old Santa Claus-reminiscent man, wearing a checkered flannel shirt and doodling away under his fluffy white beard. Some of his quirkier doodles, like the man with a beret in the poem “Something Missing” with bare butts, or the cover art for the book “A Light in the Attic” with an attic protruding and gradient-ascending from a woman’s head, will strike Silverstein in either a Desk Goblin or Spiritual Scribe-esque man. Maybe you surprisingly went as far as correctly guessing that Silverstein is an avid lover of collared shirts and jackets. What few people would ever imagine is a bald Army veteran with thick black eyebrows and a beard, exposing his equally thick black chest hair as often as possible—collared shirts unbuttoned all the way to his sternum, three layers of an undershirt and two jackets hanging down a foot below his chin, a jolly old poet and artist playing guitar for the interview photo on a floral printed bed. Perhaps this still aligns with a Spiritual Scribe? But in any interpretation, it is clear that Shel dresses as uniquely as his children’s books, filled with rough but clean lines of black and white and eccentric poetry that he was never particularly proud of.
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Shel doesn’t speak the way he looks. You would think that his thick beard and hair (not on his head) insinuates a thick voice, somewhere in the bass and baritone range, or a brooding soft-spoken sound that lulls you to sleep. But it’s not. He doesn’t speak the way he dresses, either. With his exposed chest and loud, prominent collars screaming “look at me!”, you expect confidence. You expect powerful articulation that rings through your eardrums and exerts assertion. This is also not the case. But if you’ve never seen the way he looks, or the way he dresses, only the looks and feels of his pen and paper—perhaps you would be the one to guess Shel’s voice. Short, simple, sweet poetry that sticks to children’s minds and drills a deep core memory into a motif that we remember as teenagers and adults. Shaky but firm doodles that dovetails the text, not a single color to be seen, big-headed businessmen with the hairiest legs, bald children with carrots sticking out of their eyes, a bonneted lady with clothes ten times as wide as her skeletal arms and hands. Shel has the grace and instability of his books. His voice arcs from sentence to sentence, drawing phrasing into the listeners, an accented beginning with a gradual decay to the end. His voice rasps, much like a rock star who refuses to sing, and more often than not hits a climax at a high-pitched D3 (147 Hz) as it follows a hilly sentence around the notes of his voice. He stammers, and he pronounces words wrong—Shel is not a speaker—but his delivery is clear. Shel’s hoarse voice perhaps serves to justify and reflect his gravely lines of art and roughed-out flighty nature of his words.
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Shel lived at the two ends of the longest sidewalk called America, where sand became sea and where industry became bay. In Key West was his childhood home—two stories tall, an unripe mango of an exterior complete with clean cherrywood-white wall contrasts indoors. In the middle of his education, he joined the Unites States Army, creating comics for the Army magazine, Stars & Stripes. For him, the military “taught me things about life and gave me freedom to create. The Army gave me an outlet for my work…” Serving during the Korean War from 1949 to 1955, Shel’s first book was a compilation of his military comics.
Shel only wrote about war as a boring concept (“The Battle”), or in a pacific stance (“Hug O’ War”), but perhaps the start to his 22-book long career was the happiest start of them all, arcing back to his final home at Sausalito, in the Bay of California. A decommissioned World War II ship was renovated into a two-bedroom houseboat of his dreams—cozy wood-planked walls, a floating bed chained from the ceiling, an elevated chair in a bedroom nook and a seemingly unhealthy mix of brand-name glass furniture, IKEA-esque pillows, cottagecore kitchen aesthetics, and whimsical toy cars underneath slanted balloon barge windows looking down upon the empty floor. Shel cared least about prestige and had a happy career and a very happy beginning.
Endings are the saddest of them all. A heart attack ended Shel’s life in Key West, and the Key West home ended in a hurricane less than twenty years later. His houseboat was driven by media into a million-dollar auction. We vindicate Shel’s writings; there are no happy endings, but while it lasted, to us, he gave.
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[1] https://marisamohi.com/how-to-dress-like-a-writer/
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Prompts from Daily Themes Week 5: Description
2025-02-13: Look up images of a favorite author. Look closely at their clothes. Find images of other authors, artists, public figures, etc., during the same time period. Think about your author’s clothes in this context. Write a descriptive theme that explores the relationship between the author’s clothes and their writing style.
2025-02-14: Find audio clips of a favorite author. Listen to how they speak/spoke. Write a descriptive theme that explores the relationship between the author’s speaking style, clothes, and writing style.
2025-02-15: Look up images of homes where a favorite author once lived (all the better if you can actually go there). Do the same looking, thinking, and contextualizing that you did in #3. Write a theme that explores the relationship between the author’s living space and their writing style.