What is known is that Shelby Silverstein was born in 1932, that he drew cartoons for Pacific Stars and Stripes as a G.I. He made that statement through his publisher, Harper & Row, because he has long refused to discuss his books or allow Harper's to release any photographs or biographical information about him. ''I like to think of 'Light' as not an all-time best seller but as a good book,'' Mr. In recent months, for example, it won the 1984 Garden State Children's Book Award for nonfiction from the New Jersey Library Association and the William Allan White Award, voted upon by schoolchildren in Kansas. ''Attic'' has sold more than 1 million copies since 1981, and it has been showered with awards. Silverstein's poems would give grammarians fits, that does not seem to have bothered children, parents or librarians. I just washed a behind That I'm sure wasn't mine, There's too many kids in this tub. Silverstein's antic attic, a somewhat analogous version reads: There's too many kids in this tub. Remember ''Rub-a-dub, dub, three men in a tub''? In Mr. Silverstein, is the ''Prayer of the Selfish Child'': Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, And if I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my toys to break. In ''Quick Trip,'' two children are swallowed by a giant lizard and deposited safely. In one poem, for example, a boy named Clarence Lee from Tennessee sends away for a mail-order set of parents.

A light in the attic shel