This is an IHeart podcast.

All the leaves on the giving tree have fallen,

no shade to crawling underneath.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories,

and the song you just heard was Giving Tree by Plain White Tees,

a song based on the famous picture book that was written by Shell Silverstein.

Here's Greg Engler with the story.

Poet W.H. Auden once said,

There are good books which are only for adults.

There are no good books which are only for children.

Children's picture books matter because they're a form of our first impression of literature

and become the gateway towards our appetites for the written word and our knowledge of the world.

This most distilled form of art expresses basic truths about life in such a poetic way that it assumes the form of intellectual mother's milk.

The stylistic eccentricities of Marie Sendeck, Dr. Seuss, and Shell Silverstein form the bedrock

of our childhood lexicon. Shell's story is arguably the most eccentricly interesting among the

big three. Born in 1930 on the northwest side of Chicago, Sheldon Allen Silverstein grew up in a second-story apartment crammed with relatives.

His Jewish parents, an immigrant father from Eastern Europe, and a Chicago-born mother, opened an unsuccessful bakery on the heels of the

Great Depression. Though Silverstein's mother encouraged his early knack for drawing, his father made

it clear that he was expected to join the floundering family business. Silverstein discovered his passion for drawing when he was five.

The lonely eccentric kids spent his K through 12 years drawing, reading, and listening to the radio.

Sir, is it true that you are 2,000 years old?

Oh, boy.

...