A sickly child in Brooklyn
Maurice Bernard Sendak was born on 10 June 1928 in Brooklyn, New York, the youngest of three children of Polish-Jewish immigrants, Philip and Sadie Sendak. His was a household shadowed by worry and by news from across the ocean, and Maurice himself was a frail, often bedridden boy, kept indoors by a succession of childhood illnesses. Confinement made him a watcher and a maker of pictures; lying in bed, he learned to draw and to invent worlds. He has said that the decision to become an illustrator crystallised at the age of twelve when he saw Walt Disney's Fantasia and grasped that drawings could move and live. The Brooklyn streets of the 1930s, with their stoops and their crowded relatives, formed a landscape he would return to obsessively in his art. From the start his imagination was double-edged: drawn to enchantment, but never far from fear, illness and the sense that the world was a dangerous place.
The shadow of the Holocaust
Sendak's childhood was darkened by catastrophe in Europe. His parents had left Poland before the war, but the wider family they had left behind was almost entirely destroyed in the Holocaust. According to accounts Sendak gave throughout his life, the day of his bar mitzvah was overtaken by news of relatives killed, and the grief in the family home was inescapable. This loss never left him. Critics and Sendak himself have linked the menace that runs beneath his apparently childlike books, the monsters, the threats of being eaten, the children carried off, to a consciousness formed in the knowledge that families could simply vanish. He refused to pretend, in his work, that childhood was a safe garden. The dead aunts and uncles he never met, and the ones he half-remembered, populated his imagination, and his art became in part an act of memory, a way of keeping the lost present rather than allowing them to disappear unmarked.
Learning the trade
Sendak's formal training was modest; he did not attend a major art school. After finishing high school in Brooklyn he took night classes at the Art Students League of New York while supporting himself with practical work, including a formative period from 1948 designing and building window displays for the celebrated toy shop F.A.O. Schwarz in Manhattan. There he absorbed the craft of staging a scene to catch a child's eye. A connection at the store led to his first book illustration commissions, and through the 1950s he worked prolifically, illustrating dozens of books written by others. He illustrated the popular Little Bear series by Else Holmelund Minarik, work that established his reputation for tender, closely observed drawing. In 1956 he published Kenny's Window, the first book he both wrote and illustrated himself. By the end of the decade he was an established illustrator, but his most original and disturbing work still lay ahead.
Where the Wild Things Are
In 1963 Sendak published Where the Wild Things Are, the book that would define him. It tells of Max, a boy sent to bed without supper for wild behaviour, who sails to an island of great toothy monsters, is crowned their king, presides over a wordless rumpus, and then chooses to return home, where his supper is waiting and still warm. The monsters, Sendak said, were modelled in part on the immigrant relatives who descended on his family's Brooklyn home, loud, looming and a little frightening to a small boy. The book unsettled some librarians and parents who felt its imagery too fierce for young readers, and it was occasionally restricted. But children embraced it without hesitation, and it was awarded the Caldecott Medal in 1964. Its insight was revolutionary in its simplicity: that children harbour real anger and fear, and that a story which honours those feelings can also bring a child safely home.
A trilogy of childhood
Sendak came to regard Where the Wild Things Are as the first part of a loose trilogy exploring how children master fear and desire. In the Night Kitchen followed in 1970, a dreamlike nocturnal fantasy whose nude depiction of its child hero, Mickey, drew objections and led to the book being challenged and sometimes censored. The trilogy concluded in 1981 with Outside Over There, a strange, haunting tale of a girl named Ida who must rescue her baby sister from goblins, a book Sendak considered among his most personal and which drew on his anxieties about siblings and responsibility. Across these works he refused the consoling conventions of the picture book. His children were not decorative innocents but small people contending with jealousy, abandonment and dread. He also continued to collaborate widely, illustrating books by other authors and, in 1980, designing sets and costumes for opera, an art form he loved deeply.
Honours and a difficult temperament
Recognition accumulated steadily. In 1970 Sendak became the first American illustrator to receive the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the highest international honour in children's literature. He later received the National Medal of Arts, presented in 1996, and in 2003 shared the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. Yet Sendak was never an easy or comfortable public figure. He was famously candid, even caustic, in interviews, unsentimental about children, scornful of saccharine art, and frank about his own bouts of depression and his fear of death. He disliked being filed away as a maker of charming books for the young; he insisted he simply made books, and that the truthful ones would always contain darkness. This refusal of cosiness, far from limiting his audience, was central to the respect his work commanded among artists, writers and the children who recognised in his pages an adult who did not lie to them.
A private life made public
For most of his life Sendak kept his sexuality strictly private. He shared his life for some fifty years with Eugene Glynn, a psychoanalyst, and the two lived together for decades, latterly in rural Connecticut. Sendak did not speak publicly about being gay until 2008, after Glynn's death the previous year, when he discussed the relationship in an interview at the age of eighty. He explained that he had concealed it above all out of concern for his immigrant parents, saying that all he had wanted was to be straight so that they could be happy, and that they never knew. The disclosure, late and quiet, was widely received as an act of honesty rather than confession. His grief at Glynn's death informed his final works and his last interviews, in which he spoke with unguarded emotion about loss, memory and the people he could not stop from dying.
An artist of childhood, not for it
Sendak resisted the very category in which the world had placed him. He maintained that he did not write for children in any special, simplified register, but that he wrote out of his own childhood, which had never entirely ended, and out of the fears and longings he had carried since boyhood. He admired the European fairy tale in its older, harsher form, before its terrors were sanded away, and he drew on a wide artistic inheritance, from William Blake to the engravers and illustrators of the nineteenth century, as well as on the comic strips and films of his Brooklyn youth. His drawing was dense, crosshatched and deliberate, the opposite of breezy. He believed that children were tougher and more perceptive than adults wished to admit, and that they deserved art which respected the full range of their inner lives. This conviction, that the picture book was a serious art form and not merely a nursery decoration, was perhaps his most quietly radical position.
Last works and final years
Sendak continued working into his eighties. He created a stage production of Brundibar, a children's opera with a wartime history, collaborating with the playwright Tony Kushner, and he illustrated a picture-book version of it in 2003, a project that returned him directly to the territory of the Holocaust. In 2011 he published Bumble-Ardy, a story he said he had made in order to save himself while caring for the dying Glynn. A final picture book, My Brother's Book, an elegy informed by grief and by Shakespeare, was published posthumously in 2013. In a now-celebrated 2011 radio interview, conducted less than a year before his death, he spoke movingly about mortality, telling the interviewer that he was ready, and urging listeners simply to live their lives. Sendak died on 8 May 2012, aged eighty-three, from complications of a stroke, at a hospital in Danbury, Connecticut.
Impact and legacy
Maurice Sendak permanently changed what a children's book could be. Before him, the form leaned heavily on reassurance; after him, it was free to acknowledge that the young feel rage, terror, jealousy and grief, and that art for children is most trustworthy when it tells the truth about those feelings. Where the Wild Things Are became one of the most beloved and influential picture books ever made, read to generations and adapted for stage, opera and a 2009 feature film. His insistence on honesty, shaped by a childhood lived under the shadow of the Holocaust and by a lifetime's intimacy with loss, gave the genre a new seriousness and a new respect for its readers. Sendak also stands, in his final years, as a figure who spoke plainly at last about a long and loving partnership he had kept hidden. His monsters endure because they tell children the oldest reassuring truth: that you can be wild, and frightened, and still come safely home.
Sources & further reading
Maurice Sendak, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.