At different points in their notable careers, cartoonist Shel Silverstein and writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn explored Alaska

Part of a continuing weekly series on Alaska history by local historian David Reamer. Have a question about Anchorage or Alaska history or an idea for a future article? Go to the form at the bottom of this story.

Two weeks ago, this column covered the path of hard-boiled crime writer Dashiell Hammett — a sickly, famous, and nearing 50-year-old member of the Communist Party — as he went from Hollywood celebrity to Army enlistment to his posting in remote Adak. Last week, this column covered the forced several-month sojourn of author and religion inventor L. Ron Hubbard in Ketchikan. Of course, Hammett and Hubbard are far from the only celebrated authors with ties or significant visits to Alaska. From Jack London to freshly minted Pulitzer winner Tessa Hulls, Alaska has lured and inspired numerous writers. This time, let’s look at the two disparate characters, cartoonist Shel Silverstein and Soviet exile Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

In 1960, Sheldon “Shel” Silverstein (1930-1999) was not quite the beloved author and illustrator he would become. The Korean War veteran grew up drawing whenever he could. During his Army tenure, he published a series of cartoons for Stars and Stripes, a transformative experience. In a 1968 interview, he stated, “The Army was the best thing for me as far as my art work went because I didn’t have to worry about coming through any commercial way. I knew I wasn’t going to sell or I wasn’t going to appear anywhere. I could draw what the hell I wanted to draw, so I did. And I ate three meals a day, which is lucky because usually your meals depend on how well your stuff sells.”

After leaving the service, he published a couple of compilations of old cartoons and went to work for Playboy in 1957. There, he began to expand his fame, most notably with a travelogue series called “Shel Silverstein Visits.” Basically, Silverstein was forced to circle the globe and create some cartoons about the experience, shuffling from the likes of Paris to Moscow to Italy. In the summer of 1960, he took off for Alaska and Hawaii, a chance to document life in the new states.

He arrived in Anchorage in mid-July 1960. As would happen elsewhere in Alaska, the Daily News warned locals that he appeared like a “Beatnik” from the neck up but was in fact a gentleman, as indicated by his suit and tie. Silverstein famously went with the shaved head, bearded combination, which is, of course, a well-evidenced signifier of intelligence and manliness in writers. The Nome Nugget likewise warned its readers that the “beatnik,” “bearded young man who is about town with a sketch book” was, in fact, nothing to fear, just an itinerant Playboy representative.

There was something of a nationwide panic then about supposed counterculture youths undermining American society. From the 1950s to the late 1960s, blame shifted from juvenile delinquents to beatniks to hippies as the elders learned new words. To be clear, it is evident that no one in 1960 Alaska had the clearest idea of what exactly a beatnik looked like. Silverstein told the Daily News, “Why, in some places if you don’t wear a tie, you’re a beatnik.”

While in town, he was a judge for the Miss Alaska contest won by June Bowdish. Conversation naturally arrived at the nature of Playmates, and the Daily News asked him how many Alaskans would be worthy. He replied, “We haven’t seen one yet,” a review that sounded worse after he revealed his thoughts on Playmates. “It doesn’t take a mental giant to be a Playmate. We just want good-looking dolls. We don’t care if they have brains.”

From Anchorage, he flew around the state, including stops at Fairbanks, Nome, Kotzebue and Barrow, now Utqiaġvik. With more experience in Alaska, he offered a litany of takes to the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. Alaska Natives were the “warmest, most sincere people I’ve met.” The sandwiches were “ridiculously skimpy and prohibitively expensive.” On liquor, “It’s absolutely fantastic the amount of liquor consumed in Alaska.” Overall: “If I ever was unhappily married, this would sure be the place to bring my wife on vacation.” Silverstein notably never married.

The resultant piece was published in the May 1961 Playboy. Other features in that issue of the urbane men’s magazine include a deeper dive into private airplane ownership, fiction and satire from the most respected authors of the day, an analysis of gambling systems, and something called “The Girls of Sweden,” apparently an exposé on the lack of clothing in the Scandinavian nation. Occasional actress Susan Kell was the centerfold.

Material from the interior may be too mature for some readers, but suffice to say, Silverstein was shocked by the difference between the real Alaska and the version portrayed in television and movies. The introduction notes, “There’s still gold in them thar hills, he discovered, but more panning is done by north country film critics than by adventuresome treasure seekers. Putting the lie to a crop of Hollywood fiction, Shel found nary an igloo, but did find an array of Eskimos weary of flicks about intrigue in the ice domes.” The cartoonist himself said, “Shooting a moose out of season is considered a worse offense than shooting your wife.”

As shown by his cartoons, Silverstein expected a wild country of subsistence hunters, trappers, and assorted wild men and women. Instead, he found pinball machines, electricity and overpriced food. A cook tells him in one cartoon, “OK, OK, so the hamburger was tough. What do you expect for a lousy $3.75, anyway?” After accounting for inflation, $3.75 in 1960 is about $40 in 2025 money.

Silverstein also worried about how the layers of garments affected relationships. In another cartoon, he tells a woman, “Sure, it would be fun, but I’d have to take off my outer parka, then my fur parka, and then I’d have to take off my sealskin vest, and then my sweaters, and then I’d have to take off my flannels, and by that time I’d be too tired.”

This Alaska trip occurred four years before “The Giving Tree” was published, and 21 years before “A Light in the Attic.” Playboy collected the “Shel Silverstein Visits” articles, including the piece on Alaska, in the 2007 book, “Silverstein Around the World.”

To put it simply, the Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) had a different perspective on the world from Silverstein. Solzhenitsyn was an artillery officer in the Red Army during World War II. He was an intellectual sort, deeply scarred by the wartime horrors he witnessed and increasingly critical of Soviet leadership, particularly Joseph Stalin. Unfortunately, he put those criticisms to paper, leading to his arrest in February 1945 and a sentence of eight years in the labor camps, the back-breaking, soul-crushing gulags. The person he might have become was erased, ground into nothing and reshaped by the dehumanizing experience. Yet, the morbid twist is that his subsequent fame and literary relevance were built, in large part, upon those dire years.

Stalin died in 1953. In the years immediately following, the concentrated powers that be in the Soviet Union strove to undermine the cult of personality surrounding the former General Secretary. This de-Stalinization included the previously unthinkable, the publishing of material critical of him and his oppressive regime. And so, under the express permission of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, Solzhenitsyn’s first novel was released in 1962.

That book, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” is a dire, unsettling account of life in a labor camp. Indeed, its title is literal, following the eponymous main character through a day, seeing the stark limits of his agency, seeking only to ensure the arrival of the next minute, grabbing at the smallest increments of success. At the end, the hero gained an extra bowl of mush and a metal scrap that would minutely ease his labor, bricklaying in freezing conditions. It was his best experience in recent memory; “Nothing has spoiled the day and it had been almost happy.”

The gulags were a central aspect of Stalin’s long rule, one of several heavy sticks that ensured obedience. Petty criminals, real and imagined dissidents, ethnic minorities, political rivals, and intellectuals were dispatched to these prison labor camps. Millions passed through the camps. “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was the first time such an open account of Stalinist gulags was published in the Soviet Union, and it became the way many Westerners first learned of the camps’ existence. In 1970, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. In his acceptance speech, he stated, “During all the years until 1961, not only was I convinced I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared this would become known.”

But times changed in Russia. Khrushchev was toppled in 1964, and his more open approach to Soviet history was abandoned. Solzhenitsyn’s subsequent works were published abroad. And that Nobel speech was mailed in. He dared not leave the country, afraid he would not be allowed back in. In 1973, he published “The Gulag Archipelago,” a three-volume nonfiction series on the gulag. The next year, he was arrested and deported, sent to live in West Germany.

On May 27, 1975, Solzhenitsyn landed at Ketchikan and stepped onto American soil for the first time. He had been travelling in Canada, but his arrival in the United States came without fanfare and little notice. From Ketchikan, he and his wife, Natalia Svetlova, rode the ferry to Juneau, where they checked into the Baranof Hotel. Father Cyril Bulashevich, minister at Juneau’s St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church, acted as guide.

Gov. Jay Hammond hosted a small dinner to honor the author. Some press were there, but to their explicit irritation, Solzhenitsyn asked not to be quoted and granted no interviews. As far as he was concerned, this was a “private vacation.” In the gap of actual facts, rumors spread that he was looking to settle in Alaska or perhaps tour the Russian Orthodox churches here.

To be frank, Solzhenitsyn was deeply critical of many, many things about and all over the world, including the inquisitive nature of the Western press. In his 1978 commencement speech at Harvard University, he denounced “the shameless intrusion into the privacy of well-known people according to the slogan: ‘Everyone is entitled to know everything.’ But this is a false slogan of a false era; far greater in value is the forfeited right of people not to know, not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life has no need for this excessive and burdening flow of information.”

Back in 1975, Solzhenitsyn unsurprisingly struggled with English words. In the most entertaining anecdote from his short stay in Alaska, he was having trouble pronouncing “process” during the Hammond party. He and his wife disagreed on how to say it, and he tossed her their little travel copy of a Russian-English dictionary. The great writer assumed the text would verify his version. Instead, she was right.

They visited Sitka and, on June 1, 1975, left Alaska. In keeping with his private nature, they did not announce their destination or further travel plans. Under perestroika and glasnost, the cultural and political thaws promoted by the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, many of Solzhenitsyn’s books were legally published in the country for the first time. In 1990, his citizenship was restored. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he finally returned to his homeland in 1994, where he lived out the rest of his days in a home on the Moscow outskirts.

True to form, he complained that the country had gone to hell, that there was “too much freedom” and crime. He declared, “It is Gorbachev’s glasnost that has ruined everything.” Gorbachev responded, “Well, without glasnost, he would still be living in exile in Vermont chopping wood.”

Silverstein was 29 when he visited Alaska, still in his physical prime, if before his eventual fame. Solzhenitsyn was a worn 56, lines carved deeply upon his face, the ravages of imprisonment, disease, and fear readily apparent in his movements. Two authors so widely different, yet they both found a reason to visit Alaska.