# RIP Maurice Sendak



## Pyan (May 8, 2012)

*Maurice Sendak*, author and illustrator, has died aged 83 from complications following a stroke. 

He was most famous for the 1963 children's fantasy classic "Where the Wild Things Are", which was made at various times into an animated short, an opera, and a Hollywood film.


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## hopewrites (May 8, 2012)

When I found out I gnashed my terrible teeth then ran Outside Over There. (One of my favorites among his less wildly famous works)

I always loved the way his art told a rich story.


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## Nesacat (May 9, 2012)

*Maurice Sendak, Author of Splendid Nightmares, Dies at 83*

Maurice Sendak,  widely considered the most important children’s book artist of the 20th  century, who wrenched the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world  of the nursery and plunged it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly  beautiful recesses of the human psyche, died on Tuesday in Danbury,  Conn. He was 83.                      

The cause was complications of a recent stroke, said Michael di Capua,  his longtime editor. Mr. Sendak, who died at Danbury Hospital, lived  nearby in Ridgefield, Conn.  

Roundly praised, intermittently censored and occasionally eaten, Mr.  Sendak’s books were essential ingredients of childhood for the  generation born after 1960 or thereabouts, and in turn for their  children. He was known in particular for more than a dozen picture books  he wrote and illustrated himself, most famously  “Where the Wild Things Are,” which was simultaneously genre-breaking and career-making when it was published by Harper & Row in 1963. 

Among the other titles he wrote and illustrated, all from Harper & Row, are  “In the Night Kitchen” (1970) and “Outside Over There”  (1981), which together with “Where the Wild Things Are” form a trilogy;  “The Sign on Rosie’s Door” (1960); “Higglety Pigglety Pop!” (1967); and  “The Nutshell Library” (1962), a boxed set of four tiny volumes  comprising “Alligators All Around,” “Chicken Soup With Rice,” “One Was Johnny” and “Pierre.” 

In September, a new picture book by Mr. Sendak, “ Bumble-Ardy”  — the first in 30 years for which he produced both text and  illustrations — was issued by HarperCollins Publishers. The book, which  spent five weeks on the New York Times children’s best-seller list,  tells the not-altogether-lighthearted story of an orphaned pig (his  parents are eaten) who gives himself a riotous birthday party. 

A posthumous picture book, “My Brother’s Book” — a poem written and  illustrated by Mr. Sendak and inspired by his love for his late brother,  Jack — is scheduled to be published next February.  

Mr. Sendak’s work was the subject of critical studies and major  exhibitions; in the second half of his career, he was also renowned as a  designer of theatrical sets. His art graced the writing of other  eminent authors for children and adults, including Hans Christian  Andersen, Leo Tolstoy, Herman Melville, William Blake and Isaac Bashevis  Singer.         
 In book after book, Mr. Sendak upended the staid, centuries-old  tradition of American children’s literature, in which young heroes and  heroines were typically well scrubbed and even better behaved; nothing  really bad ever happened for very long; and everything was tied up at  the end in a neat, moralistic bow. 

*Headstrong and Bossy*  
 Mr. Sendak’s characters, by contrast, are headstrong, bossy, even obnoxious. (In “Pierre,”  “I don’t care!” is the response of the small eponymous hero to  absolutely everything.) His pictures are often unsettling. His plots are  fraught with rupture: children are kidnapped, parents disappear, a dog  lights out from her comfortable home. 

A largely self-taught illustrator, Mr. Sendak was at his finest a shtetl  Blake, portraying a luminous world, at once lovely and dreadful,  suspended between wakefulness and dreaming. In so doing, he was able to  convey both the propulsive abandon and the pervasive melancholy of  children’s interior lives.  

His visual style could range from intricately crosshatched scenes that  recalled 19th-century prints to airy watercolors reminiscent of Chagall  to bold, bulbous figures inspired by the comic books he loved all his  life, with outsize feet that the page could scarcely contain. He never  did learn to draw feet, he often said.  

In 1964, the American Library Association awarded Mr. Sendak the  Caldecott Medal,  considered the Pulitzer Prize of children’s book illustration, for  “Where the Wild Things Are.” In simple, incantatory language, the book  told the story of Max, a naughty boy who rages at his mother and is sent  to his room without supper. A pocket Odysseus, Max promptly sets sail:         
 And he sailed off through night and day        
 and in and out of weeks        
 and almost over a year        
 to where the wild things are. 

There, Max leads the creatures in a frenzied rumpus before sailing home, anger spent, to find his supper waiting.  

As portrayed by Mr. Sendak, the wild things are deliciously grotesque:  huge, snaggletoothed, exquisitely hirsute and glowering maniacally. He  always maintained he was drawing his relatives — who, in his memory at  least, had hovered like a pack of middle-aged gargoyles above the  childhood sickbed to which he was often confined.  

Maurice Bernard Sendak was born in Brooklyn on June 10, 1928; his  father, Philip, worked in the garment district of Manhattan. Family  photographs show the infant Maurice, or Murray as he was then known, as a  plump, round-faced, slanting-eyed, droopy-lidded, arching-browed  creature — looking, in other words, exactly like a baby in a Maurice  Sendak illustration. Mr. Sendak adored drawing babies, in all their  fleshy petulance.  

A frail child beset by a seemingly endless parade of illnesses, Mr.  Sendak was reared, he said afterward, in a world of looming terrors: the  Depression;  World War II;  the Holocaust, in which many of his European relatives perished; the  seemingly infinite vulnerability of children to danger. He experienced  the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby  in 1932 as a personal torment: if that fair-haired, blue-eyed  princeling could not be kept safe, what certain peril lay in store for  him, little Murray Sendak, in his humble apartment in Bensonhurst? 

An image from the Lindbergh crime scene — a ladder leaning against the  side of a house — would find its way into “Outside Over There,” in which  a baby is carried off by goblins.  

As Mr. Sendak grew up — lower class, Jewish, gay — he felt permanently  shunted to the margins of things. “All I wanted was to be straight so my  parents could be happy,” he told The New York Times in a 2008  interview. “They never, never, never knew.”  

His lifelong melancholia showed in his work, in picture books like “We  Are All in the Dumps With Jack and Guy” (1993), a parable about homeless  children in the age of AIDS. It showed in his habits. He could be  dyspeptic and solitary, working in his white clapboard home deep in the  Connecticut countryside with only Mozart, Melville, Mickey Mouse and his  dogs for company.  

It showed in his everyday interactions with people, especially those  blind to the seriousness of his enterprise. “A woman came up to me the  other day and said, ‘You’re the kiddie-book man!’ ”  Mr. Sendak told Vanity Fair last year.“I wanted to kill her.” 

But Mr. Sendak could also be warm and forthright, if not quite  gregarious. He was a man of many enthusiasms — for music, art,  literature, argument and the essential rightness of children’s  perceptions of the world around them. He was also a mentor to a  generation of younger writers and illustrators for children, several of  whom, including Arthur Yorinks, Richard Egielski and Paul O. Zelinsky,  went on to prominent careers of their own.  

*Long Hours in Bed*  
 As far back as he could remember, Mr. Sendak had loved to draw. That and  looking out the window had helped him pass the long hours in bed. While  he was still in high school — at Lafayette in Brooklyn — he worked part  time for All-American Comics, filling in backgrounds for book versions  of the “Mutt and Jeff” comic strip. His first professional illustrations  were for a physics textbook, “Atomics for the Millions,” published in  1947. 

In 1948, at 20, he took a job building window displays for F. A. O.  Schwarz. Through the store’s children’s book buyer, he was introduced to  Ursula Nordstrom, the distinguished editor of children’s books at  Harper & Row. The meeting, the start of a long, fruitful  collaboration, led to Mr. Sendak’s first children’s book commission:  illustrating  “The Wonderful Farm,” by Marcel Aymé, published in 1951. 

Under Ms. Nordstrom’s guidance, Mr. Sendak went on to illustrate books  by other well-known children’s authors, including several by Ruth  Krauss, notably “A Hole Is to Dig” (1952), and Else Holmelund Minarik’s  “Little Bear” series. The first title he wrote and illustrated himself,  “Kenny’s Window,” published in 1956, was a moody, dreamlike story about a lonely boy’s inner life. 

Mr. Sendak’s books were often a window on his own experience.  “Higglety Pigglety Pop! Or, There Must Be More to Life” was a valentine to Jennie, his beloved Sealyham terrier, who died shortly before the book was published. 

At the start of the story, Jennie, who has everything a dog could want —  including “a round pillow upstairs and a square pillow downstairs” —  packs her bags and sets off on her own, pining for adventure. She finds  it on the stage of the World Mother Goose Theatre, where she becomes a  leading lady. Every day, and twice on Saturdays, Jennie, who looks  rather like a mop herself, eats a mop made out of salami. This makes her  very happy.         
 “Hello,” Jennie writes in a satisfyingly articulate letter to her  master. “As you probably noticed, I went away forever. I am very  experienced now and very famous. I am even a star. ... I get plenty to  drink too, so don’t worry.” 

By contrast, the huge, flat, brightly colored illustrations of “In the  Night Kitchen,” the story of a boy’s journey through a fantastic  nocturnal cityscape, are a tribute to the New York of Mr. Sendak’s  childhood, recalling the 1930s films and comic books he adored all his  life. (The three bakers who toil in the night kitchen are the spit and  image of Oliver Hardy.)  

Mr. Sendak’s later books could be much darker. “Brundibar” (2003), with  text by the playwright Tony Kushner, is a picture book based on an  opera  performed by the children of the Theresienstadt concentration camp. The  opera, also called “Brundibar,” had been composed in 1938 by Hans  Krasa, a Czech Jew who later died in Auschwitz. 

*‘Melodramatic Menace’*  
Reviewing the book   in The New York Times Book Review, the novelist and children’s book  author Gregory Maguire called it “a capering picture book crammed with  melodramatic menace and comedy both low and grand.” He added: “In a  career that spans 50 years and counting, as Sendak’s does, there are  bound to be lesser works. ‘Brundibar’ is not lesser than anything.” 

With Mr. Kushner, Mr. Sendak collaborated on  a stage version of the opera, performed in 2006 at the New Victory Theater in New York.        
 Despite its wild popularity, Mr. Sendak’s work was not always well  received. Some early reviews of “Where the Wild Things Are” expressed  puzzlement and outright unease. Writing in Ladies’ Home Journal, the  psychologist Bruno Bettelheim took Mr. Sendak to task for punishing Max:         
 “The basic anxiety of the child is desertion,” Mr. Bettelheim wrote. “To  be sent to bed alone is one desertion, and without food is the second  desertion.” (Mr. Bettelheim admitted that he had not actually read the  book.) 

“In the Night Kitchen,” which depicts its young hero, Mickey, in the  nude, prompted many school librarians to bowdlerize the book by drawing a  diaper over Mickey’s nether region.  

But these were minority responses. Mr. Sendak’s other awards include the  Hans Christian Andersen Award for Illustration, the Laura Ingalls  Wilder Award and, in 1996, the National Medal of the Arts, presented by  President Bill Clinton. Twenty-two of his titles have been named New  York Times best illustrated books of the year.  

Many of Mr. Sendak’s books had second lives on stage and screen. Among  the most notable adaptations are the operas “Where the Wild Things Are”  and “Higglety Pigglety Pop!” by the British composer Oliver Knussen, and  Carole King’s  “Really Rosie,”  a musical version of “The Sign on Rosie’s Door,” which appeared on  television as an animated special in 1975 and on the Off Broadway stage  in 1980. 

In 2009, a  feature film version of “Where the Wild Things Are”  — part live action, part animated — by the director Spike Jonze opened  to favorable notices. (With Lance Bangs, Mr. Jonze also directed “Tell  Them Anything You Want,” a documentary film about Mr. Sendak first  broadcast on HBO that year.) 

In the 1970s, Mr. Sendak began designing sets and costumes for  adaptations of his own work and, eventually, the work of others. His  first venture was Mr. Knussen’s “Wild Things,” for which Mr. Sendak also  wrote the libretto. Performed in a scaled-down version in Brussels in  1980, the opera had its full premiere four years later, to great  acclaim, staged in London by the Glyndebourne Touring Opera.  

With the theater director Frank Corsaro, he also created sets for  several venerable operas, among them Mozart’s “Magic Flute,” performed  by the Houston Grand Opera in 1980, and Leos Janacek’s “Cunning Little  Vixen” for the New York City Opera in 1981.  

For the Pacific Northwest Ballet, Mr. Sendak designed sets and costumes  for a 1983 production of Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker”; a film version was  released in 1986.  

Among Mr. Sendak’s recent books is his only pop-up book, “Mommy?,”  published by Scholastic in 2006, with a scenario by Mr. Yorinks and  paper engineering by Matthew Reinhart.  

Mr. Sendak’s companion of a half-century, Eugene Glynn, a psychiatrist  who specialized in the treatment of young people, died in 2007. Mr.  Sendak’s personal assistant, Lynn Caponera, worked for him almost as  long while living at his Ridgefield home. No immediate family members  survive. Though he understood children deeply, Mr. Sendak by no means  valorized them unconditionally. “Dear Mr. Sun Deck ...” he could drone  with affected boredom, imitating the semiliterate forced-march school  letter-writing projects of which he was the frequent, if dubious,  beneficiary.  

But he cherished the letters that individual children sent him unbidden,  which burst with the sparks that his work had ignited.  

“Dear Mr. Sendak,” read one, from an 8-year-old boy. “How much does it  cost to get to where the wild things are? If it is not expensive, my  sister and I would like to spend the summer there.” -- The New York Times


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## gully_foyle (May 9, 2012)

This is sad, but then I remember being surprised that he was still alive. I have a wonderful Where the Wild Things Are T-shirt that I found in a second hand store in Colorado. Tomorrow I shall wear it in his honour. I loved his book, and my kids loved it. Thankyou Maurice, and I hope your journey takes you over the sea, and that you are the king of the wild things.


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## digs (May 9, 2012)

I feel that he understood childhood in a way that very few authors (let alone adults) do. RIP.

gully - I also have a Where the Wild Things Are t-shirt! I love it.


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## TL Rese (May 11, 2012)

i remember luving that book when i was a kid.  sendak lived a long, amazing life, but it's still sad to see him go.


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## Varangian (May 25, 2012)

RIP Maurice Sendak. Where The Wild Things Are was one of my favourite books as a child. 

Christopher Walken reads Where The Wild Things Are (and throws in some of his own amusing commentary at times), you can listen to it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKNaYlzssbc


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