Back to Blog
In an interview with the journal The Lion and the Unicorn, Schwartz said that he didn’t deal directly with complaints about his books. “It's just not appropriate for children.” She asked the school board to remove the book from the library, but a special committee voted unanimously to keep the books, and the school turned down an appeal. “Right away I thought of Jeffrey Dahmer,” Jean Jaworski, then the mother of a fifth-grader, told The Argus-Press in 1995. One parent even made a connection between Schwartz’s book and a serial killer, citing the story “Wonderful Sausage,” about a butcher who puts people through his sausage grinder and sells the meat to his patrons. There's a story called 'Just Delicious' about a woman who goes to a mortuary, steals another woman's liver, and feeds it to her husband. “There's no moral to ,” former elementary school teacher and mother Sandy Vanderburg told the Chicago Tribune. īy the time the Scary Stories series reached the height of its popularity in the early '90s, the book was condemned by parents nationwide. Parents hated Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. The first Scary Stories book was released in 1981, and Schwartz would go on to write two more- More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones-before his death in 1992. What's interesting is that eventually patterns emerge.” This will involve a lot of reading and scholarly books and journals and sometimes discussions and scholarly folklorists … In the process of accumulating everything on a subject, I begin setting aside things that I particularly like. When asked about his writing process for an interview with Language Arts magazine, Schwartz said, “Basically, what I do with every book, is learn everything I can about the genre. They are based on things that people saw or heard or experienced-or thought they did.” “Some of these tales are very old, and they are told around the world,” Schwartz wrote in the foreword to Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. He also drew from publications like The Hoosier Folklore Bulletin and interviewed folklorists. Among his sources were books like American Folk Tales and Songs and Sticks in the Knapsack and Other Ozark Tales. When writing his book Witcracks, Schwartz turned to the archives at the Library of Congress and those of the president of the American Folklore Society, using that research and his connections for Scary Stories. Research was a huge part of Schwartz's process. The tales in the Scary Stories books were based on folklore. His journalistic instincts and whimsical leanings are probably to thank for Scary Stories’ characteristic surrealism and eerily matter-of-fact storytelling. One of his first published works was A Parents’ Guide to Child’s Play and Recreation. He also had a penchant for wordplay, saying that creating rhymes was a good way for “people to express their feelings without getting in trouble.” After Schwartz left journalism, he started working for a research corporation, which he couldn’t stand, and began doing that part-time, devoting the rest of his hours to writing books. The author of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark didn’t start out writing scary stories.Īlvin Schwartz, the author and adapter behind the Scary Stories trilogy, actually began his career as a journalist, writing for The Binghamton Press from 1951 to 1955. The series would become a preteen cult classic and among the most banned or challenged books of the following decades. The first installment of Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark trilogy hit bookshelves in 1981.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |