Where the Wild Things Are author dies
83-year-old Sendak, rejecter of label as children’s writer, suffered stroke
LOS ANGELES — Maurice Sendak, the children’s book illustrator and author whose unsentimental approach to storytelling revolutionized the genre and whose best-known tale was the dark fantasy Where the Wild Things Are, has died. He was 83.
Sendak, who also was a set designer for opera and film, died Tuesday at a hospital in Danbury, Conn., said his friend and caretaker, Lynn Caponera. He had suffered a stroke Friday.
He had already been proclaimed “the Picasso of children’s books” by Time magazine when, in his 30s, he wrote and illustrated Where the Wild Things Are. It became one of the 10 best-selling children’s books of all time.
The work, published in 1963, was a startling departure from the sweetness and innocence that ruled children’s literature. Wild Things tapped into the fears of childhood and sent its main character — an unruly boy in a wolf costume — into a menacing forest to tame the wild beasts of his imagination.
Librarians banned the book as too frightening. Psychologists and many adults condemned it for being too dark. However, Wild Things won the Caldecott Medal for most distinguished American picture book for children.
Sendak bristled at the notion that he was an author of children’s books and told People magazine in 2003 that he wrote stories “about human emotion and life.”
“They’re pigeonholed as children’s books, but the best ones aren’t — they’re just books,” he said.
An illustrator of about 80 books and author-illustrator of another 20, Sendak won almost every important prize in children’s literature. President Bill Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Arts in 1997.
He considered Wild Things part of a loose trilogy that included the award-winning In the Night Kitchen (1970), about the nocturnal adventures of Mickey, who barely escapes being baked into a cake, and Outside Over There (1981), the tale of a baby kidnapped by goblins.
Sendak said he didn’t particularly want to make a Wild Things movie, but told Entertainment Weekly in 2003 “that’s all anybody wanted from me.”
When an imaginative film adaptation of Wild Things, directed by Spike Jonze, was released in 2009, Sendak expressed pleasure that it was not seen as a film for children.
“It’s not cute and cuddly! It’s a real movie,” Sendak told the Los Angeles Times.
Maurice bernard sendak was born June 10, 1928, in Brooklyn and grew up there. He was the youngest of three children of Philip and Sadie Sendak, Polish Jews who emigrated to the U.S. just before World War I.
A sickly child, Sendak spent a great deal of time drawing. His father, a dressmaker, told him elaborate bedtime stories. At 9, he started writing stories with his brother, Jack.
Many relatives died in the Holocaust, and his father lost most of the family fortune in the stock market crash of 1929.
“My childhood was completely misshapen by what was going on in the world,” Sendak said on National Public Radio in 2005.
Sendak had no immediate survivors. For 50 years, he shared his life with Dr. Eugene Glynn, a psychoanalyst who died in 2007.