“Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”
Children’s books are among the first memories that set the background for childhood, and there are those that stick with us forever. Do you remember the first time you ever heard someone read Mother Goose or Where The Sidewalk Ends out loud? Doesn’t it almost seem as if they’ve just always been around?
For a lot of kids growing up in the last twenty years, Where The Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, was the unconscious set upon which childhood was staged. The unforgettable characters and their strange stories, the unusual, lively, otherworldly + enchanting illustrations — this was a children’s book for the ages. The origin story of this memorable author is on our minds because this is actually Mr. Sendak’s birth month, he was born June 10, 1928, in New York City to be exact.
“Children do live in fantasy and reality; they move back and forth very easily in a way we no longer remember how to do.”
Maurice Sendak grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He was a sickly child for the greater part of his formative years, who initially started drawing out of boredom. Sendak was a natural artist and even landed a part-time job at All-American Comics while he was still in high school.
After high school Maurice got a job designing window displays and while working on the displays for F.A.O. Schwarz in the late 1940s, Sendak met the legendary children’s book editor Ursula Nordstrom. Ursula had worked with multiple successful writers and it was her influence that helped Sendak land his first job illustrating children’s books. During the 1950s, Maurice even worked on books by authors like Else Holmelund Minarik and Jan Wahl, which were childhood favorites in their time.
Maurice studied at the Art Students League and illustrated more than eighty books by other authors before ever writing one himself. In 1956, Sendak published Kenny’s Window, the first children’s book he both wrote and illustrated himself.
Before long, he turned the children’s book world upside down with his 1963 masterpiece Where the Wild Things Are. Sendak captured the public’s imagination with this tale of a boy’s journey into a strange land inhabited by grotesque yet appealing monsters.
Sendak’s dark, moody illustrations were a stark contrast to the typically light and happy fare found in most children’s books of the time. The main character Max, like many of Sendak’s protagonists, acted like a real child, not some idealized version of youth.
“I think it is unnatural to think that there is such a thing as a blue-sky, white-clouded happy childhood for anybody. Childhood is a very, very tricky business of surviving it. Because if one thing goes wrong or anything goes wrong, and usually something goes wrong, then you are compromised as a human being. You’re going to trip over that for a good part of your life.”
Many people believe that Sendak based the experiences in Where The Wild Things Are on some of the first fearful memories of his own childhood. Sendak was deeply affected by the Lindbergh baby abduction for instance, and even remembers hearing Mrs. Lindbergh’s tearful voice pleading with the kidnappers via radio to rub camphor on her infant’s chest because she didn’t want his cold to get worse.
Maurice’s perspective in his books was also said to have been largely influenced by his parents who were Polish Jewish immigrants named Sadie and Philip Sendak, who suffered from the loss of their relatives in concentration camps.
“In plain terms, a child is a complicated creature who can drive you crazy,” Sendak once said in an interview. “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.”
Where the Wild Things Are earned Sendak a Caldecott Medal for exemplary children’s book illustration. Throughout his long career, Sendak produced more than fifty books, including In the Night Kitchen (1970) and Outside Over There (1981). He also used his creative talents in a number of other forms, collaborating with Carole King for the musical Really Rosie.
Sendak designed sets and costumes for stage versions of his books and other productions as well. In the early 1980s, he created the sets for several operas, including Mozart’s Magical Flute at the House Grand Opera.
“Grown-ups desperately need to feel safe, and then they project onto the kids. But what none of us seem to realize is how smart kids are. They don’t like what we write for them, what we dish up for them, because it’s vapid, so they’ll go for the hard words, they’ll go for the hard concepts, they’ll go for the stuff where they can learn something. Not didactic things, but passionate things.”
