Who was Shel Silverstein?
One person that can definitively answer that question is Marvin Gold. They had been friends since their childhoods in Chicago. Their lives intertwined, in many ways both were social outcasts and were magnets to each other. Silverstein And Me is to say the least a controversial book, you will either love it, or loathe it depending on how you wish to remember Shel Silverstein. Marvin Gold pulls no punches and tells the story as it was. Mostly I found it uproariously funny interspersed with with great sadness. As prolific a writer as Shel was, and a figure very much in the public eye, he was also a very private and somewhat secretive man with many acquaintances and few friends. To say Shel’s life was somewhat checkered does not do it justice. Shel’s life was bordering on the downright bizarre. His college career is a good example. Expelled from the University of Illinois, dismissed from the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, quit from the School of Art Institute of Chicago in the first year, a
