The Giving Tree
Shel Silverstein (1964)
“Sixty-four pages. No chapters. One of the most argued-over books in American children's literature — a story so simple it splits readers into opposite camps.”
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The Giving Tree
Shel Silverstein (1964) · 64pages · Contemporary / Children's Literature
Summary
A tree loves a boy. The boy takes her apples, her branches, her trunk across a lifetime of visits. Each time he takes something, the tree is happy. By the end, the boy is an old man and the tree is a stump. He sits on her. She is happy. The book refuses to say whether any of this was right.
Why It Matters
The Giving Tree has sold over 10 million copies and remains in continuous print more than sixty years after publication. It was rejected by multiple publishers before Harper and Row accepted it, and it has never left the bestseller lists. It is the most argued-over picture book in American litera...
Themes & Motifs
Diction & Style
Register: Deliberately elementary — short declarative sentences, compound constructions linked by 'and', second-grade vocabulary sustained across the entire book
Narrator: Third-person, past tense, completely neutral — the narrator never editorializes, never names an emotion except throug...
Figurative Language: Near zero
Historical Context
1964 America — Cold War, civil rights movement, early environmentalism: The Giving Tree arrives at the intersection of two emerging conversations: feminism (who is expected to give without limit, and why?) and environmentalism (what happens when you consume a natural r...
Key Characters
Talking Points
- Is the tree happy? Use evidence from the text to argue both sides — then decide which reading you find more convincing and explain why.
- The tree is female and the boy is male. Does this matter? Would the book mean something different if the pronouns were reversed, or if both characters shared the same gender?
- Silverstein never names the boy and never shows his full face clearly. Why? What does withholding a name and a face do to how you read his character?
- Compare the boy's language in childhood ('and they would play') to his language in adolescence ('I want some money'). What does the shift in grammar reveal about growing up?
- The book is a fable, but it has no moral at the end. Why do you think Silverstein chose to leave the moral out? What happens to the reader when the story ends without telling them what to think?
Notable Quotes
“Once there was a tree... and she loved a little boy.”
“And every day the boy would come and he would eat her apples, and play in the forest, and swing on her branches... and the tree was happy.”
“I want some money.”
Why Read This
Because it is one of the only texts in any grade level that gives you a complete argument in both directions and does not tell you which side to take. Every critical reading skill — evidence, inference, authorial intent, narrative structure, the g...