Maurice Sendak passed away this morning in a hospital in Connecticut where he had been since a stroke last Friday. He was 83. Read the NPR article here. From interviews with Sendak, it might be said that he didn’t mind heading out of this world, happy to follow his dearly loved ones already gone. And his death … Continue reading
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In the Night Kitchen, 1970
So, what’s great about Sendak’s next best known book? His second little dark haired hero, Mickey, falls into a surreal bakers’ world and saves the day by flying a dough plane to a giant milk bottle and getting the bakers the milk they need for the morning cake. Again, as in Where the Wild Things Are, imagination takes a boy to a world outside of his own. But this one’s got a slightly different kind of ending… Continue reading
Where the Wild Things Are, 1963
When you read criticism on Maurice Sendak’s first hugely successful book (and there are academic essays, I assure you), you realize, holy shit, people have applied phrases like “colonialist or Freudian prism” and “the psychoanalytic story of anger” to this tail of an angry boy who sails to where the wild things are. This isn’t the first place that Where the Wild Things Are has been treated as a book whose readership has no age limits. Continue reading
Maurice Sendak, genius extraordinaire
Over the last five decades, Maurice Sendak has been the genius behind innumerable picture books, some of which have reached the status of irrefutable classics. Indeed, today Sendak is one of the most recognized names in illustrated children’s books. Born in Brooklyn in 1928 to Polish Jewish immigrants, he knew by the age of 12 that he wanted to be an illustrator. Continue reading
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