Contents
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1 Early life
2 Poetry
3 Personal life
4 Bibliography
5 References
6 External links
Early life[edit]
Jack Prelutsky was born on September 8, 1940 in Brooklyn, New York to Charles, an electrician/plumber and Dorothea, a homemaker. While he was still a baby, a fire burned his family 's apartment and he was saved by his Uncle Charlie, who was a stand up comic who played the Borscht Belt. He was poor growing up, and he said he was "...a sensitive kid in a working class neighborhood. I got beat up a lot. I was a skinny kid with a big mouth. A bad combination."[2]
He attended …show more content…
He wrote poems to go with the drawings last minute. He met with Susan Hirshman, and was amazed when they wanted his work; not the drawings that took six months to draw, but the poems which took two hours. He was 24 at the time, and the poems appeared in his first book, A Gopher in the Garden and Other Animal Poems, in 1967. Hirshman told him he was a natural poet, published his book, and remained his editor until she retired 37 years later.[5]
Poetry[edit]
Prelutsky has written more than 50 poetry collections, including Nightmares: Poems to Trouble Your Sleep (1976), It 's Halloween (1977), The Mean Old Mean Hyena (1978), and Something BIG Has Been Here (1990). Nilsen, A. P. and Nilsen, D.L.F. (2000). Encyclopedia of 20th-Century American Humor [Electronic version]. Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press. He has also compiled numerous children 's anthologies comprising poems of others.
He has also set his poems to music on the audio versions of his anthologies. He often sings and plays guitar on most of them.
In 2006, the Poetry Foundation named Prelutsky the inaugural winner of the Children 's Poet Laureate …show more content…
Zelinsky)
It 's Valentine 's Day (1983) (illustrated by Yossi Abulafia)
The Random House Book of Poetry for Children (1983) (illustrated by Arnold Lobel)
It 's Snowing! It 's Snowing! (1984) (illustrated by Jeanne Titherington)
What I Did Last Summer (1984) (illustrated by Yossi Abulafia)
The New Kid on the Block (1984) (illustrated by James Stevenson)
Ride a Purple Pelican (1984) (illustrated by Garth Williams)
My Parents Think I 'm Sleeping (1985) (illustrated by Yossi Abulafia)
Read Aloud-Rhymes for the Very Young (1986) (illustrated by Marc Brown)
Tyrannosaurus Was a Beast: Dinosaur Poems (1988) (illustrated by Arnold Lobel)
Beneath a Blue Umbrella (1990) (illustrated by Garth