Maurice Bernard Sendak

One of the pre-eminent children's book authors and illustrators of the twentieth century, Maurice Sendak has produced over a dozen books of his own as well as illustrating more than seventy stories by other authors. He is well known both for his distinctive illustrations and for his stories, which explore, in unsentimental terms, how children deal with their fears and emotions through fantasy. Sendak's career has also encompassed such projects as film adaptation and set and costume design for a variety of theatrical productions.

Maurice Bernard Sendak was born on June 10, 1928 in Brooklyn, New York, the youngest child of Philip and Sarah (Schindler) Sendak. Before World War I, his parents left their Jewish shtetls (small towns) in Poland to come to the United States, where Philip went to work in Manhattan's garment district. The Sendak family also included a daughter, Natalie, and another son, Jack, who is five years older than Maurice. Jack Sendak works in electronics, but has also written several published children's books, including two illustrated by his brother.

From an early age Maurice's imagination was fueled by the bedtime stories of his father, a dressmaker in New York City's garment district, would tell the children. Often melancholy and full of fantasy and mythical symbols, they were spun out of East European Jewish folklore. Because he was a sickly child, stricken with measles and pneumonia at the age of two, and scarlet fever at four, Maurice spent a major portion of his childhood at home drawing pictures of the life he observed outside his window. At the age of nine he started writing stories with his older brother, Jack, and the two hand-lettered and illustrated their work on pieces of shirt cardboard that they bound together with tape.

It was his older sister, Natalie, who gave Maurice his first book, Mark Twain's Prince and the Pauper, on his ninth birthday. "A ritual began with that book, which I recall very clearly," Sendak told Virginia Haviland in an interview for the Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress (October 1971). "It was such a beautiful object...[It] smelled good and it also had a shiny cover. I remember trying to bite into it, which I don't imagine is what my sister intended when she bought the book for me. But the last thing I did was to read it. It was all right I think it started then, a passion for books and bookmaking."

Maurice was also drawn to the comic books and movies of pop culture, and was especially fascinated by Mickey Mouse, who was born in the same year as he. Sendak says he recalls copying with all his might every picture his brother drew, signing his name to his brothers drawings, and presenting them at school as his own work. He started drawing at a very early age, loving pictures and books with a great passion, and has said that he knew he wanted to be a writer and illustrator before he even went to school.

During his years at Lafayette High School in Brooklyn, Sendak held a part-time job with All-American Comics, adapting Mutt and Jeff newspaper comic strips to a comic-book format. Except for his art classes, Sendak hated school. "School is bad for you if you have any talent," he told Selma G. Lanes. "You should be cultivating that talent in your own particular way." Outside the classroom, Sendak taught himself cross-hatching and other techniques from such nineteenth-century illustrators as Wilhelm Busch, Boutet de Monvel, and the Victorian caricaturist George Cruikshank.

After graduating from high school in 1946, he moved to Manhattan, whose bustling elegance had always attracted him. He found work constructing papier-mâché fairy tale characters for Timely Service, a window-display house. It was during his employment there that Sendak's illustrations were first published, as an accompaniment to Atomics for the Millions (1947), a book written by his high school physics teacher. When a promotion in 1948 removed him from the sort of work he enjoyed, Sendak quit his job and returned home to his parents. Then, "out of a job, out of sorts and money," he spent hours at the window, filling sketchbooks with drawings of Rosie, a ten-year-old girl whom he admired for her ability to imagine herself into being anything she wanted to be.

In the summer of 1948, Sendak collaborated with his brother, carving and painting six mechanical wooden toys that Jack had engineered. The brothers brought their creations to famous New York toy store F.A.O. Schwartz, where store executives admired the toys but felt that they would cost too much to mass-produce. Impressed with Sendak's talent, however, they offered him a job as assistant director of the window-display department, a position he held for the next three years.

While working at F.A.O. Schwartz, Sendak enrolled in some night classes at the Art Students League, largely to please his father. During a display of his drawings at the store, F.A.O. Schwartz's book buyer invited Ursula Nordstrom, Harper & Row's children's book editor, to stop by. Captivated by Sendak's sketches, Miss Nordstrom immediately hired him to illustrate Marcel Ayme's Wonderful Farm (1951), his first children's book. Thus began a long and fruitful association, a period that Sendak called one of the happiest times of his life. Then came A Hole Is To Dig, by Ruth Krauss, for which he was awarded The New York Times Best Illustrated Book. Working with Ruth Krauss was an inspiration to him, and he learned how to make text and pictures work with each other, and not against.

Sendak's reputation as a children's book illustrator was firmly established with his drawings for Ruth Krauss's book A Hole Is to Dig (1952), a collection of such word definitions as "A dream is to look at the night and see things." Subsequently deluged with freelance illustrating offers, Sendak left his job at F.A.O. Schwartz to pursue his true calling and moved into his own apartment in Manhattan.

Also during his twenties, Sendak underwent psychoanalysis, a process, he told Jonathan Cott in an interview published in Pipers at the Gates of Dawn (1983), that "enriched and deepened me and gave me confidence to express much that I might not have without it. People used to comment continually on the fact that the children in my books looked homely, Eastern European Jewish as opposed to the flat, oilcloth look considered normal in children's books," Sendak told Cott. "They were just Brooklyn kids, old-looking before their time. But a baby does look a hundred years old."

After some years of illustrating, he finally wrote and illustrated his own book, Kenny's Window in 1956, which garnered praise from critics, and in 1957 his second, Very Far Away, which was also well received. He also collaborated with Meindert DeJong. One of their efforts was The Wheel on the School. Another book collaboration was The Happy Rain, written by Sendak's brother, Jack.

Up to this point Sendak's works had been popular, but some critics felt that his books were "somewhat derivative". That perception ended abruptly in 1963 with the publication of his Where the Wild Things Are. This highly original work, which remains his best known, features a boy named Max, whose mother sends him to his room without supper for acting like a "wild thing". Max vents his anger by turning his room into a world of wild creatures, which, Sendak has noted, were inspired by the faces of his Jewish relatives.

Where the Wild Things Are marked a turning point in Sendak's career. He felt that all the work he had done up to that point was merely preparation for creating this work. Its publication, for which he received the coveted Caldecott Medal in 1964, confirmed his place as an internationally famous children's book author-illustrator. The book also generated a good deal of controversy at the time of its publication. Many reviewers praised Sendak's ability to capture effectively the strong emotions of childhood, but others, including child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, felt that the book was far too frightening for small children.

Several years later, Sendak suffered a heart attack. Recovering, he learned that his mother had cancer. He also realized that his beloved dog Jennie would soon be dead. All of these factors led him to produce his most personal work, Higglety, Pigglety, Pop! or, There Must Be More to Life in 1967. The story, illustrated with black-and-white drawings, more somber than many of his previous efforts, recounts the adventures of Jennie, a Sealyham Terrier just like Sendak's dog, who decides "There must be more to life than having everything!" and leaves home. After working to gain experience, she wins the leading role in the World Mother Goose Theatre's production of "Higglety, Pigglety, Pop!" Reviewers were enthusiastic about this fantastical tale, though they noted that it was more melancholy than his previous works.

Sendak spent the next two years working on In the Night Kitchen, published in 1970. The pictures for this story were a bit of a departure from Sendak's usual style; here he produces more graphic, almost comic-book illustrations. The story is a celebration of the sensual joys of childhood, with the gleeful hero Mickey, who loses his clothes near the beginning of the book, immersing himself first in batter and later, after he cleverly fashions an airplane out of dough to escape, in milk. The full frontal nudity in some of the illustrations generated some controversy when the book was published, but most reviewers found the story captivating.

Sendak produced some of his most masterful pen-and-ink illustrations for a collection of Grimm's fairy tales, published under the title The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from Grimm in 1973. He continued to collaborate with other authors, producing illustrations for Randall Jarrell's Fly by Night in 1976, for which he won a New York Times award for best illustrated children's book; and working with Matthew Margolis to create Some Swell Pup, or, Are You Sure You Want a Dog? in 1976. He also spent two years working to produce a half-hour animated film adaptation of the Nutshell Library and The Sign on Rosie's Door, which aired in 1975. The script, with musical numbers by Carole King, was published as a book and was later developed into an Off-Broadway play, opening in October 1980 and running for a year.

In 1981, Sendak published Outside Over There, the third book in the trilogy he began with Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen. A strange, magical tale that examines such strong emotions as jealousy and sibling rivalry, the story tells of nine-year-old Ida, who is entrusted with the care of her baby sister. While Ida is engrossed with playing her horn, goblins come in and kidnap the baby. Ida flies after the goblins and rescues her sister by playing her horn and dissolving the goblins into a whirling stream. The book has been highly praised by critics. John Cech of the Christian Science Monitor (May 11, 1981), called the illustrations "hauntingly beautiful". John Gardner in The New York Times Book Review (April 26, 1981) termed it "a profound work of art for children". Sendak received the American Book Award in 1982 for this work.

In the 1980s, Sendak became involved in producing costume and set designs for opera and ballet, including the Houston Grand Opera's production of Mozart's Magic Flute, the New York City Opera's production of Leos Janacek's Cunning Little Vixen, Sergei Prokofiev's Love for Three Oranges, the Los Angeles Opera's production of Mozart's Idomeneo, and the Pacific Northwest Ballet's production of Nutcracker and the Mouse King, an adaptation of E. T. A. Hoffman's original Nutcracker tale.

In 1984 he produced two books, The Love for Three Oranges; The Glyndebourne Version, with Frank Casaro, and Nutcracker, with Ralph Manheim, both of which grew out of his work on the theatrical productions.

Sendak's later works included the 1993's We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy, a pictorial narrative of urban children at risk that accompanies the text of two Mother Goose rhymes; and the illustrations for Arthur Yorink's The Miami Giant, which tells of an explorer who discovers a lost tribe of giants.

Sendak's contribution to the world of children's literature has been profound. With his unique ability to capture the joys, fears, and insecurities of childhood, he has revolutionized the content of children's books, expanding the limits of what is considered appropriate for young people. In recognition of his achievements, Sendak has received numerous awards, including the Hans Christian Andersen International Medal in 1970 for his body of illustration work (he was the first American to be so honored); the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award in 1983 for his "substantial and lasting contribution to children's literature"; and the 1996 National Medal of Arts, awarded by President Bill Clinton. The New York Times reviewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote, "There is a grandeur and complexity about the pictures that intimidates. They have a quality of nightmare."

The wide-ranging influences on Sendak's art extend from family Photographs, to King Kong (evident in Wild Things), comic books, the images of Arthur Hughes, Beatrix Potter, and Jean de Bruhnoff (the author and illustrator of the Babar books), and the art of the nineteenth-century illustrator Randolph Caldecott. "Randolph Caldecott gave me my first demonstration of the subtle uses of rhythm and structure in a picture book," Sendak wrote in his essay "Some of My Pictures". In his Caldecott Medal acceptance speech, he attributed Caldecott's greatness to "the truthfulness of his vision of life," which "children recognize as true to their own lives".

Never married, Sendak left New York for the calmer environment of a country home and studio in Ridgefield, Connecticut. He filled the gap left by his beloved dog Jennie's death with Erda, a German shepherd, and Io, a golden retriever. Shy and soft-spoken, Sendak says that although he loves children, he has few regrets about not having any of his own. He listens to music when he draws. "Sketching to music is a marvelous stimulant to my imagination," he said in his Caldecott Medal acceptance speech, "and often a piece of music will give me the needed clue to the look and color of a picture". Sendaks eleven-room house is "filled with the treasures of a civilized and playful mind", according to John Lahr, in his article for the New York Times Magazine (October 12, 1980), including first editions of Herman Melville, Henry James, and Beatrix Potter, original artwork by Winsor McCay and William Blake, and an extensive collection of Mickey Mouse memorabilia.

Sendak's stories are enjoyed in thirteen languages, and 3,000 of his drawings are housed in the A.S.W. Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia. In 1988 he became artistic director of the Sundance Children's Theatre, a newly created branch of Robert Redford's Sundance Institute. Sendak has also taught at Yale University and the Parsons School of Design.