Peter Yarrow wrote the song in 1958 before he joined the group. It started with a poem his roommate, Lenny Lipton, left in his typewriter. In a Songfacts interview , Yarrow told the story:"Lenny Lipton and I were at Cornell, and it was exam time. He came to my place in Collegetown, sat down at the typewriter, and wrote some poetic words - he had been thinking about Ogden Nash for a while. And he wrote part of what became the lyric. He actually left the piece of paper in the typewriter when he left because he was absorbed in getting to his exams. It was not intended to be a lyric of a song or anything - it was just something that he typed on paper, and I looked at it and loved it. I wrote the rest of the words to give it a song form and a dramatic arch, and the music to it.Later, on the second album [], when we were looking for children's songs - we did some children's songs on the first album, including 'Autumn to May' and 'It's Raining' - I suggested 'Puff, the Magic Dragon,' and we put it on the album, without any thought that it might ever become popular in any important way. Yet, it happened spontaneously at some point, because a DJ somewhere in the Northwest started to play it on the radio, and it just took off, and it's the song that it now is."A few years after this song became a hit, Yarrow found Lipton and gave him half the songwriting credit. Lipton, who was a camp counselor when Yarrow found him, gets extensive royalties from the song. Lipton went on to develop a system for projecting films in 3D