The Poet

JACK PRELUTSKY

Jack Prelutsky was born in 1940 in New York and grew up with his younger brother and parents in a working-class neighborhood made up of Jewish, Irish and Italian families in the Bronx. “My father’s name was Charles and my mother’s was Dorothea but everyone called them Charlie and Dottie. Our six- oor apartment building was like a little village.” His mother stayed home to raise two challenging young boys while his father worked as an electrician and a radio/TV repairman. He graduated from the High School of Music and Art as a voice student and later attended Hunter College.

A coffeehouse folk singer and guitar player, Prelutsky was involved in the Greenwich Village folk music scene from the late ‘50s well into the ‘60s. The wonderful photograph of him as a Beat-hipster with a carnation clenched in his teeth leaning against a lamppost is from that period. He worked at the Folklore Center where he helped put on Bob Dylan’s first New York concert. He was also the first artist to sing a Dylan song on the radio. When Natalie Merchant asked him about the connection, he said, “I was friends with Dylan, Shel Silverstein, Phil Ochs, Peter Yarrow, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, among others. Joan Baez borrowed five dollars from me and never paid me back but she probably doesn’t remember me.” Although he never recorded during his folk heydays he has since set many of his poems to music and recorded them. 

Although he always enjoyed playing with language, Prelutsky discovered writing as a career only by accident in his early twenties after he’d spent months on a project that involved drawings of fantastical animals. He decided one night to write a little poem to describe each. After a friend encouraged him to show the poems to an editor, he was surprised to find that she thought he had a talent for writing verse. “Susan Hirschman told me I was the worst artist she’d ever seen, but a natural poet.” She encouraged him to start writing, published his first book, and remained his editor for thirty-seven years, until she retired. 

Prelutsky published his first book in 1967 but it wasn’t until the early 1980s that he gained a wider audience by editing a comprehensive analogy, The Random House Book of Poetry for Children. This analogy was followed by a collection of 100 original poems, The New Kid on the Block, including “Bleezer’s Ice-Cream.” After many more books established him as a major figure in children’s literature, Jack Prelutsy was named the first Children’s Poet laureate of America in 2006.