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Alvin Schwartz

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Author

The Resume

    (March 25, 1927-March 14, 1992)
    Born in Brooklyn, New York
    American author
    Primarily specialized in literature for young people
    Most well known for his controversial Scary Stories series of books
    Books in the Scary Stories series include; Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, and Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones
    AB from Colby College and MS from Northwestern in Journalism
    Some of his other titles included; Stories to Tell a Cat, I Saw You in a Bathtub, All Our Noses Are Here, There is a Carrot in My Ear, When I Grew Up Long Ago, and Cross Your Fingers, Spit in Your Hat

Why he might be annoying:

    He's not the Alvin Schwartz who used to write the Batman and Superman newspaper comic strips.
    The Scary Stories books, collections of (semi) original horror stories have been the most challenged (for inclusion into public and school libraries) books for the nineties and the first decade of the Twentieth Century and are on track to keep up their dubious winning record for the second decade.
    Much of the appeal and controversy surrounding the Scary Stories is directed at the Stephen Gammell illustrations (which have been replaced) rather than the stories themselves.
    It was 2016 before any of his work (a movie based on the Scary Stories collection) was filmed.
    He worked as a reporter for several years before turning to writing.
    His early professional writing efforts were social justice research projects financed by government grants AKA our money.
    Some of his stories were simply old folk tales that he just copied with little or no change.
    His books for children were determined to have been written on a fifth grade level.
    The bad guys usually won in his stories.
    Subjects covered in his books which were aimed at children included; the occult, satanism, necrophilia, and cannibalism.
    He wrote the following for children; 'When is a car not a car?' 'When it turns into a parking lot.'

Why he might not be annoying:

    The Scary Stories books were described as combining 'characteristic surrealism and eerily matter of fact storytelling.'
    He served honorably in the United States Navy during WWII.
    He spent years working as a professor of English at Rutgers before his death.
    He sold over three million copies of the over fifty books he wrote.
    Part of his writing process was to read his manuscripts aloud in his bathroom because its acoustics were so good. He did this because he realized that many of his books would be read aloud by teachers and parents to children.
    He could finish one of his short story collections in as little as six months. Novels took a year.
    He was a dedicated researcher, fully half the time he took to write a novel was taken up in research.
    His technical use of English; words, sentence structure, grammar, was simply brilliant.
    His writing was very bare bones because, as he put it, he wanted the reader to fill in the blanks for themselves.
    He died before the controversy over his books arose and was therefore never able to defend himself.
    He had nice eyes.

Credit: tom_jeffords


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    In 2023, Out of 3 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 14 Votes: 92.86% Annoying
    In 2020, Out of 3 Votes: 33.33% Annoying
    In 2019, Out of 3 Votes: 66.67% Annoying
    In 2017, Out of 3 Votes: 33.33% Annoying
    In 2016, Out of 3 Votes: 66.67% Annoying