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Maurice Sendak, "Where The Wild Things Are" Author, Dies At 83

Jen Chung

Published May 8, 2012

Modified May 8, 2012

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Jen Chung

Published May 8, 2012

Modified May 8, 2012

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Maurice Sendak, the beloved author and illustrator of dozens of children's books, died at age 83 in Connecticut today. He had suffered a stroke on Friday and died in a Danbury hospital.

The NY Times reported his death and has an appreciation of his work in the obituary:

[Sendak was] 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...

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...

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.

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.

Sendak also inhabited the role of curmudgeonly genius—in an interview with the Times in 2008, he said, "I hate people," and preferred the company of his dog, Herman (this was a year after his longtime partner of 50 years, Dr. Eugene Glynn, died). In 2011, Sendak told the Guardian that Herman was "German... He doesn't know I'm Jewish." He aslo believed in being truthful to children and even adults, "In plain terms, a child is a complicated creature who can drive you crazy. There's a cruelty to childhood, there's an anger. And I did not want to reduce Max to the trite image of the good little boy that you find in too many books."

He told the AP in 2003, "I write books as an old man, but in this country you have to be categorized, and I guess a little boy swimming in the nude in a bowl of milk (as in `In the Night Kitchen') can't be called an adult book. So I write books that seem more suitable for children, and that's OK with me. They are a better audience and tougher critics. Kids tell you what they think, not what they think they should think." And to people who said he should have made a sequel to "Where The Wild Things Are," he said, "Go to hell":

Sendak was happy to give his opinions about most anyone: Here's what the Guardian found out, "Of Salman Rushdie, who once gave him a terrible review in the New York Times, he says: 'That flaccid fuckhead. He was detestable. I called up the Ayatollah, nobody knows that.' Roald Dahl: 'The cruelty in his books is off-putting. Scary guy. I know he's very popular but what's nice about this guy? He's dead, that's what's nice about him.' Stephen King: 'Bullshit.' Gwyneth Paltrow: 'I can't stand her.'"

Earlier this year, Stephen Colbert interviewed Sendak in a wonderful two-part series:

The Colbert Report
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And in 2010, the Spike Jonze-directed documentary about Sendak, Tell Them Anything You Want, was released by Oscilloscope Laboratories, the production company founded by Adam Yauch.

Let the wild rumpus begin.

Tagged

children's book

maurice sendak

where the wild things are

Jen Chung

Jen Chung is a former WNYC and Gothamist editor.

Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations

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