Maurice Sendak

American · 1928 to 2012

Born Maurice Bernard Sendak on June 10, 1928, in Brooklyn, New York, the youngest child of Polish-Jewish immigrants Philip, a dressmaker, and Sadie Schindler Sendak, he grew up in a household darkened by the loss of relatives murdered in the Holocaust and by his own frail health. Confined to bed for long stretches as a child, he discovered books, Mickey Mouse, and Walt Disney's Fantasia, which he saw at twelve and which decided his vocation. He never went to college. He worked first in the window displays of FAO Schwarz, where the children's book buyer introduced him in his early twenties to the editor Ursula Nordstrom at Harper & Row, who in his words watered him like a hothouse flower for ten years. His first solo book, Kenny's Window, appeared in 1956. The Nutshell Library quartet followed in 1962. Where the Wild Things Are (1963), in which a boy named Max sails to an island of fanged monsters and is crowned their king, scandalised some parents and won the Caldecott Medal; he later identified the wild things as his own loud Yiddish-speaking aunts and uncles in Brooklyn, the vilde chayas of childhood scolding. In the Night Kitchen (1970) and Outside Over There (1981) completed his trilogy of the child's interior life. He designed sets for Mozart's The Magic Flute and other operas, lived for fifty years with the psychoanalyst Eugene Glynn in a Connecticut farmhouse stocked with first editions of his beloved Henry James, and received the National Medal of Arts in 1996. He died of complications from a stroke on May 8, 2012, in Danbury, Connecticut, at the age of eighty-three.