"Now Here's My Plan..."
His best known cartoon of the 1950s was featured on the cover of his next cartoon collection, Now Here's My Plan: A Book of Futilities, published by Simon & Schuster in 1960. Silverstein biographer Lisa Rogak wrote:
- The cartoon on the cover that provides the book's title would turn out to be one of his most famous and often-cited cartoons. In the cartoon, two prisoners are chained to the wall of a prison cell. Both their hands and feet are shackled. One says to the other, "Now here's my plan." Silverstein was both fascinated and distressed by the amount of analysis and commentary that almost immediately began to swirl around the cartoon. "A lot of people said it was a very pessimistic cartoon, which I don't think it is at all," he said. "There's a lot of hope even in a hopeless situation. They analyze it and question it. I did this cartoon because I had an idea about a funny situation about two guys."
Silverstein's cartoons appeared in issues of Playboy from 1957 through the mid-1970s, and one of his Playboy features was expanded into Uncle Shelby's ABZ Book (Simon & Schuster, 1961), his first book of new, original material for adults. Because some of his material was unclear whether it was intended for adults or children, the 1985 reprint had a conspicuous cover label, "A Primer for Adults Only".
Read more about this topic: Shel Silverstein
Famous quotes containing the words now here and/or plan:
“If I fail, it is difficult to believe that it matters. Poetry runs in our veins, and over the centuries will flower now here, now there. If it does not come from my pen it will come from another’s.”
—Ruth Dallas (b. 1919)
“He fashions evil for himself who does evil to another, and an evil plan does mischief to the planner.”
—Hesiod (c. 8th century B.C.)