History Creator / ShelSilverstein

* ''Every Thing On It'' (2011) (poetry collection, published posthumously)

* DoesNotLikeShoes: Some characters in his illustrations rarely wear them. Shel himself is often seen barefoot in several photographs.

* OnePersonBirthdayParty: In "Happy Birthday", nobody comes to the narrator's birthday party. He doesn't care because he gets to eat all the ice cream and tea.

* ANounReferredToAsX: "A Boy Named Sue"

-->-- "Listen to the Mustn'ts", ''Where the Sidewalk Ends''

* ''Literature/FallingUp'' (1996) (poetry collection)

* ''Falling Up'' (1996) (poetry collection)

* AbusiveParents:
** In the poem "Every Lunchtime," the kid's mother packs a venomous snake in his lunch every day.
** In the poem "Quality Time," a father takes his daughter golfing... and uses her as a tee.
* AIIsACrapshoot: The poem "My Robot" has the narrator building a robot to do chores for them, only for the robot to [[SecondLawMyAss demand the narrator to do work for it]].

* AngryGuardDog: "Christmas Dog". He mistakes SantaClaus for an intruder and chases him away.

* CarnivoreConfusion: In "Strange Restaurant," the narrator tries to order food at a restaurant only to find that every dish [[spoiler:down to the salad]] requires killing some member of the staff. The waitress's a cow, the busboy's a hen, the chef is a fish, etc.
* CompanionCube: The poem "Snowball," in which the narrator makes himself a pet snowball. [[spoiler:It melts.]]
* TheComplainerIsAlwaysWrong: The poem "Complainin' Jack."
* CuttingTheKnot: In "Mirror, Mirror", when the evil queen's magic mirror won't tell her she's the most beautiful in the land no matter how many times she asks, she threatens to smash it until it gives her the answer she wants. It works.

* DidntThinkThisThrough: In "Keep-Out House", the narrator builds a house with no windows or doors so nobody else can get in. He then realizes that he can't get in, either.

* {{Duck}}: The poem "Web-Foot Woe."
* ElementalRockPaperScissors: "The Bear, the Fire, and the Snow". The bear fears the snow, the snow fears the fire, the fire fears the river, and the river fears the bear.

* ExactWords:
** Invoked in the poem "Obedient", in which a disobedient student is told by his teacher to go stand in the corner until she tells him he can turn around. He complies -- but she never tells him, and he is forgotten soon after. He stands there in the corner all through the weekend, which leads into summer vacation. Soon after, the school is closed down and relocated, ''all while this boy continues to stand there for forty years'' as he waits for the teacher to say, "Turn around." In conclusion...
--->''This might not be just what she meant,''\\
''But me -- I'm so obedient.''
** In "Every Thing On It", a boy asks for a hot dog with everything on it. He gets a hot dog piled with a large number of random items, including a rake, a bee, a goldfish, a flag, a fiddle, and a front porch swing.
* EyeScream: In "Carrots", a boy hears that carrots are good for your eyesight and stabs a carrot into each of his eyes. He asks if he's not doing it right.

* GeniusLoci: "Hungry Kid Island" is about this.

* HeadphonesEqualIsolation: The poem "Headphone Harold."

* KillerRabbit: "Sybil The Magician's Last Show." The eponymous magician can't be bothered to buy food for her rabbit, so [[spoiler:when she goes to pull him out of her hat one night, ''he pulls her into the hat and eats her.'']]
* LikeGoesWithLike: In "Long-Leg Lou and Short-Leg Sue," the two characters go out walking together, but Long-Leg Lou gets frustrated that Short-Leg Sue can't walk as fast as him and decides to go walking with someone else. Short-Leg Sue goes walking with Slow-Foot Pete.
* LongList: The poem "No."

* MinorFlawMajorBreakup: A platonic example in "Long-Leg Lou and Short-Leg Sue," where Long-Leg Lou decides to stop walking with Short-Leg Sue because she can't walk as fast as he can.

* NeatFreak: The poem "Clean Gene."

* NotAMask: The poem "Best Mask?" is a rare example where the maskless person is the narrator.

* PhonyPsychic: In the poem "Crystal Ball," the psychic accurately predicts everything her customer ate for lunch, then admits that she only figured it out by [[spoiler:looking at her dress]].

* {{Pun}}: In the poem "The Monkey," several words are replaced with numbers. Many replacements are painfully forced.
* PyrrhicVictory: Played for laughs in "Big Eating Contest".

* TakeThatAudience: "Rotten Convention" describes a whole host of gruesome and gross people. It ends with:
-->And everybody there kept askin'...\\
Where were you?
* TemptingFate: In the poem "Cookwitch Sandwich," the kid tells the witch cook to make him a sandwich. [[ExactWords Insert predictable punchline here.]]
* TrainingFromHell: The poem "The Runners". The illustration shows the track team being chased by the coach, who is a lion, over a spiked pit trap.
* TurtleIsland: "Hungry Kid Island."

* WasItReallyWorthIt: Played for laughs in "Big Eating Contest". The narrator has to pay $2 for the entrance fee, $20 for the burgers and fries, and then $110 for the resulting hospital bill. He wins first prize...which is $5.
* WhenIWasYourAge: Amply demonstrated in the poem of the same name. Parodied when the narrator says he's nine and a half, and his uncle scoffs, "When I was your age, I was ten."

* EatsBabies: "Someone Ate The Baby." [[spoiler: [[UnreliableNarrator It was the narrator.]]]]

-->''This might not be just what she meant,''\\

* SomebodyNamedNobody: The poem "Nobody" in ''Where the Sidewalk Ends''.
--> ''Nobody loves me, nobody cares,\\
Nobody picks me peaches and pears.\\
Nobody offers me candy and Cokes,\\
Nobody listens and laughs at my jokes. ...\\
So, if you ask me who's my best friend, in a whiz,\\
I'll stand up and tell you NOBODY is!''

* ''Where the Sidewalk Ends'' (1974) (poetry collection)

* AnimalSweetOnObject: PlayedForDrama in "The Bagpipe Who Didn't Say No". The poem tells how a tired turtle found a bagpipe on the beach and fell in love with it. Of course, the bagpipe can't speak, so the "relationship" progresses through a long string of requests from the turtle until he tries cuddling the bagpipe and it says "aaooga". Taking this as a sign he's offended his "love", the turtle begs "her" to tell him that it's not over and "she" doesn't want him to leave, but [[DownerEnding of course the bagpipe can't speak]].
-->''And the turtle crept off crying and he ne'er came back no more''
-->''And he left the bagpipe lying on that smooth and sandy shore.''
* AnnoyingYoungerSibling: In "For Sale", a boy gets so fed up with his annoying younger sister that he tries to auction her off, but nobody will buy her.
-->One sister for sale! One sister for sale! One crying and spying young sister for sale!
* ApocalypseHow: In "Hungry Mungry," when Mungry starts out by eating his parents, and then proceeds to go all the way up to Class X-4 by eating up the United States, the world, the universe, and finally himself!
* ApocalypticLog: The poem "Boa Constrictor."
** Also "True Story" where the last line says they died.
* {{Autocannibalism}}: "Hungry Mungry" ends with Hungry Mungry eating his body, after having already eaten the rest of the universe.

* BigEater: In ''Where the Sidewalk Ends'', there is a poem about a girl who eats an entire whale. However, she takes eighty-nine years to do it. This trope is also [[ExaggeratedTrope exaggerated]] in "Hungry Mungry", where a child ''eats the entire universe.''

* {{Bowdlerise}}: The poem "The Googies Are Coming" was originally titled "The Gypsies Are Coming", before being changed to the current title due to the older title coming off as rather bigoted (due to the poem being about the titular googies/gypsies coming to kidnap children and sell them).

* CasualDangerDialogue: "Boa Constrictor" The narrator is talking about it as he is eaten.
* ComicallyMissingThePoint: In "Peanut Butter Sandwich," the king's mouth is glued shut after eating an extra-sticky peanut butter sandwich. After twenty years of constant toil, he finally opens his mouth again... and his first words are "How about a peanut butter sandwich?"

* CoversAlwaysLie: ''Where the Sidewalk Ends'' has a cover drawing with two children and a dog peering over the edge of the earth. This is from a poem in the book called "The Edge of the World," not "Where the Sidewalk Ends." The title poem is about the grassy spot between the sidewalk and the street, and it has no illustration in the book.

* DeathByIrony: In the poem "Lester", the title character gets ThreeWishes. He turns out to have some levels of [[InsufferableGenius smartassery]], as he starts spending his wishes ''on more wishes''. [[spoiler:He keeps doing this his entire life, but never actually uses his wishes for anything else, so by the time he dies he has millions.]]

* EarlyInstallmentWeirdness: "Where the Sidewalk Ends" is not only Silverstein's first collection of poems, it's also the only one where the title poem is not the first one.

* FlatWorld: The poem "The Edge of the World." The illustration for this poem is also on the cover to the collection ''Where the Sidewalk Ends.''

* GreenGators: In "The Unicorn", the refrain is a list of different kinds of animals, including "green alligators".
* HairWings: He has a poem about a boy with ridiculously long hair who was mercilessly teased about it until his weeping caused it to flap like wings, carrying him into the air.
* GrowingUpSucks: "I Won't Hatch!" is from the point of view of a baby chick who refuses to leave the safety of the egg because they've heard about all the horrible things in the world like war, pollution, shouting people, and roaring airplanes, despite the cackling of the hens and the begging of the roosters.

* HumanAliens: [[spoiler:Downplayed.]] The poem "The Planet of Mars" describes the aliens on Mars as very human-like, [[spoiler: except for the fact that they have heads on their bottoms.]]
* HurricaneOfExcuses: The poem "Sick."

* KnowNothingKnowItAll: In the poem, "Smart", a father gives his "smartest" son a dollar bill, and the boy trades it with someone for two quarters (because two is more than one), then he trades those for three dimes, then four nickels, and finally, five pennies. He then shows his dad, who turns red, closes his eyes and shakes his head, and the boy concludes [[ComicallyMissingThePoint that his dad is so proud he's speechless.]]

* MultipleHeadCase:
** The poem "Us."
** This poem from ''Where the Sidewalk Ends'':
-->''Chester come to school and said:''\\
''"Durn, I growed another head!"''\\
''Teacher said: "It's time you [[{{Hypocrite}} knowed]]''\\
''[[ComicallyMissingThePoint The word is 'grew' instead of 'growed'.]]"''

* NothingIsScarier: Sarah's demise at the end of "Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout (Would Not Take the Garbage Out)", letting the reader's imagination run wild.
-->And there, in the garbage she did hate,\\
Poor Sarah met an awful fate,\\
That I cannot now relate\\
Because the hour is much too late.

* ThePigPen: The poem "The Dirtiest Man In The World."
* PlaygroundSong: "Boa Constrictor" has turned into one.
* PlayingSick: "Sick."
* PosthumousNarration: The poem "True Story," played for laughs.

* ReptilesAreAbhorrent: "Boa Constrictor."

* RoguishRomani: "The Gypsies Are Coming", from ''Where The Sidewalk Ends'', is all about how the titular people are coming to "buy little children and take them away". Later editions censor it to replace "gypsies" with the nonsense word "googies". The poem's illustration, which depicts a stereotypical "gypsy" carrying off children in a sack, was kept, however.

* TrademarkFavoriteFood: Peanut butter sandwiches for the king in "Peanut Butter Sandwich," practically to the [[GRatedDrug point of addiction]].

* TrashOfTheTitans: The poem "Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout (Would Not Take The Garbage Out)."

* WhatsInsidePlot: "What's in the Sack?" From ''Where the Sidewalk Ends.''

* WishingForMoreWishes: In "Lester", the eponymous character encounters a goblin that grants him one wish. The boy wishes for two wishes, which he gets, surprisingly enough. So with each wish, he wishes for two more wishes, giving him four wishes. And with each of those wishes, he wishes for two more, giving him eight. This goes on for some time, until the boy dies, presumably from old age. All that's left of him is a humongous pile of unused wishes. The narrator of the story then invites the reader to take a few, and warns the reader not to "waste your wishes on wishing."

* ''A Light in the Attic'' (1981) (poetry collection)

* AbsurdlyLongLimousine: It may or may not technically be a limousine, but "Longmobile" certainly fits the spirit of this trope.
-->''It's the world's longest car, I swear,\\
It reaches from Beale Street to Washington Square.\\
And once you get in it\\
To go where you're going,\\
You simply get out, 'cause you're there.''

* AllGirlsLikePonies: In "Little Abigail and the Beautiful Pony," Abigail sees a pony for sale that she wants, but her parents won't buy it for her. She eventually dies of heartbreak and her parents are devastated. The poem ends with the line "This is a good story to read to your parents when they won't buy you something you want."

* BoundAndGagged: The poem "Kidnapped," complete with illustration of an excessively tied and chained girl. [[spoiler:(Granted, it is eventually revealed to be a child’s excuse for why they were late for school)]]

* ContrivedClumsiness: Recommended in "How Not To Have To Dry The Dishes":
-->If you have to dry the dishes
-->And you drop one on the floor --
-->Maybe they won't let you
-->Dry the dishes anymore.

* DeathByGluttony: In "Pie Problem", the narrator will die if he has one more piece of pie, but will also die if he can't have one more piece of pie. Since he's going to die anyway, he chooses the pie.
* DeathByIrony:
** The poem "Fear (Barnabas Browning)," where the title character is so afraid of drowning that he refuses to leave his room. He dies by [[spoiler: literally crying an ocean and drowning in his own tears]].
** The poem "Ladies First," in which Pamela Purse is always using the title excuse for her selfishness. When the group gets caught by cannibals and are about to be eaten by the king, she still goes, [[TooDumbToLive "Ladies first!"]]
** In the poem "Lester", the title character gets ThreeWishes. He turns out to have some levels of [[InsufferableGenius smartassery]], as he starts spending his wishes ''on more wishes''. [[spoiler:He keeps doing this his entire life, but never actually uses his wishes for anything else, so by the time he dies he has millions.]]
* DemBones: In "Day After Halloween," a salesman offers low prices on "skeletons, spirits and haunts"; he's overstocked with them now that the holiday's over.

* DoesThisRemindYouOfAnything: The titular character in "Little Abigail and The Pony" [[spoiler: dying from a broken heart]] sounds an awful lot like a euphemism for suicide.
* ADogAteMyHomework: The narrator of "Blame" says he wrote an extremely wonderful book, but a goat ate it. He wrote a new book in a hurry, but it's not as good as the first one, so he tells people to blame the goat if they don't like the second book. Whether a goat really did eat the book is ambiguous. On one hand, it sounds a lot like a tired old excuse; on the other hand, the poem's illustration is a grinning goat with ripped book pages in its mouth, so maybe he's telling the truth after all.

* EmptySwimmingPoolDive: The punchline of "Fancy Dive."
* ExactWords:

** In "Have Fun", the narrator assures us that it's safe to swim in Pemrose Park because there are no sharks in it. The illustration shows an octopus in the lake instead.

* FailedASpotCheck: In "Fancy Dive", Melissa somehow forgets to make sure that there's water in the pool before doing an extremely complex dive into it. That is, assuming someone didn't drain the pool ''while'' she was diving...

* MortonsFork: In "Pie Problem", the narrator is so bloated that he'll die if he eats one more piece of pie, but if he doesn't have one more piece of pie, he'll also die. Since he's going to die anyway, he decides he might as well have one more piece of pie.
* MultipleEndings: The poem "Hippo's Hope" concerns a hippopotamus who attempts to fly off a mountain and has three different endings: Happy (the hippo succeeds and soars off into the clouds); Unhappy (the hippo fails and plummets down the mountain, breaking all his bones); and Chicken (the hippo turns around and goes home to have cookies and tea).

** In the poem "Mr. Smeds and Mr. Spats", Mr. Smeds has 21 heads and only one hat. He sells his hat to Mr. Spats, who has 21 hats and only one head.

* NoEnding: A number of his poems end with the story unresolved, such as "Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout." This trope was the whole ''point'' of his poem "Suspense," where a DamselInDistress is ChainedToARailway by one villain, while TheHero is being held prisoner by another. And then a fifth character shows up, and it's unclear whether he's a hero or villain...
-->''A CRASH! And a CRY!\\
And I'm sorry but I\\
Have forgotten the rest of the story.''

* NowILayMeDownToSleep: Parodied in "Prayer of the Selfish Child."
-->''Now I lay me down to sleep;\\
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.\\
If I should die before I wake,\\
I pray the Lord my toys to break,\\
So none of the other kids can use 'em...\\
Amen.''

* OhCrap: The illustration that accompanies "Fancy Dive".
-->''She did thirty-four jackknives, backflipped and spun,\\
Quadruple gainered, and reached for the sun,\\
And then somersaulted nine times and a quarter—\\
And looked down and saw that the pool had no water.''

* PoweredByAForsakenChild: The poem "The Homework Machine" is about a machine that does homework, but it is run by a small child who does some basic math problems wrong.
* PrayerOfMalice: "Prayer of the Selfish Child."

* ScareEmStraight: "Little Abigail and the Beautiful Pony" ends with Abigail dead since she didn't get the beautiful pony. A note at the end suggests children should read it to their parents if they refuse to buy something for them.

* StrippedToTheBone: A rare self-induced example in "It's Hot." It's an unpleasantly warm day, so the character removes his shoes to cool off. He's still hot, so he takes off all his clothes. When this doesn't help either, he takes off his skin and sits around in his bones. Then he despairingly exclaims, "It's ''still'' hot!"

* VillainsOutShopping: The narrator in "Monsters I've Met" seems a bit disappointed that the monsters he meets never seem to want to kill him, but only to ask him for small favors.

* WhosOnFirst: The poem "The Meehoo with an Exactlywatt." Silverstein directly acknowledges the TropeNamer as the main inspiration.

* ''A Light in the Attic'' (1981) (poetry collection)

* ''Lafcadio, The Lion Who Shot Back'' (1963) (children's novel)
* ''Literature/TheGivingTree'' (1964) (picture book)
* ''Uncle Shelby's ABZ Book'' (1960) (alphabet book consisting of BlatantLies and intentionally terrible advice)

* ''Film/WhoIsHarryKellermanAndWhyIsHeSayingThoseTerribleThingsAboutMe'', a movie for which he wrote songs

* ''Film/ThingsChange'' (1988 film directed by Creator/DavidMamet): Co-wrote the screenplay

* ''Don't Bump the Glump'' or ''Uncle Shelby's Zoo'' (poetry collection)
* ''A Light in the Attic'' (poetry collection)
* ''Where the Sidewalk Ends'' (poetry collection)
* ''Lafcadio, The Lion Who Shot Back'' (children's novel)
* ''Literature/TheGivingTree'' (picture book)
* ''Uncle Shelby's ABZ Book'' (alphabet book consisting of BlatantLies and intentionally terrible advice)
* ''Wordless Dances'' (collection of adult-themed cartoons)
* ''Falling Up'' (poetry collection)
* ''[[{{Spoonerism}} Runny Babbit: A Billy Sook]]'' (poetry collection, published posthumously)
* ''Every Thing On It'' (poetry collection, also posthumous, probably the last one)

* ''Film/ThingsChange'', (1988 film directed by Creator/DavidMamet)

* AluminumChristmasTrees: The poem "People Zoo" concerns a kid who gets kidnapped by animals and put in display in a human zoo. [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_zoo People zoos]] have existed, although they're usually not run by talking animals.

Sheldon Allan "Shel" Silverstein (September 25, 1932 – May 10, 1999) was best known as an author of offbeat children's poetry. He also wrote picture books, songs, song lyrics (most famously "[[Music/JohnnyCash A Boy Named Sue]]", "The Unicorn" and "The Cover of Rolling Stone"), one-act plays and films.

* DancingPants: The TropeNamer is a poem in ''Where The Sidewalk Ends''.

* CasualDangerDialog: "Boa Constrictor" The narrator is talking about it as he is eaten.

* NiceHat: Averted with this short rhyme: "Teddy said it was a hat; so I put it on. Now Dad is saying, 'Where the heck's the toilet plunger gone?!'"

* DeathByGluttony: "Pie Problem".