Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz

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.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz