Joyce Dopkeen/The New York Times
Maurice Sendak at his Ridgefield, Conn., home with his German Shepherd, Herman, in 2006. More Photos »
By MARGALIT FOX
Published: May 8, 2012
Maurice Sendak,
widely considered the most important children’s book artist of the 20th
century, who wrenched the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world
of the nursery and plunged it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly
beautiful recesses of the human psyche, died on Tuesday in Danbury,
Conn. He was 83.
The cause was complications of a recent stroke, said Michael di Capua,
his longtime editor. Mr. Sendak, who died at Danbury Hospital, lived
nearby in Ridgefield, Conn.
Roundly praised, intermittently censored and occasionally eaten, Mr.
Sendak’s books were essential ingredients of childhood for the
generation born after 1960 or thereabouts, and in turn for their
children. He was known in particular for more than a dozen picture books
he wrote and illustrated himself, most famously “Where the Wild Things Are,” which was simultaneously genre-breaking and career-making when it was published by Harper & Row in 1963.
Among the other titles he wrote and illustrated, all from Harper & Row, are “In the Night Kitchen” (1970) and “Outside Over There”
(1981), which together with “Where the Wild Things Are” form a trilogy;
“The Sign on Rosie’s Door” (1960); “Higglety Pigglety Pop!” (1967); and
“The Nutshell Library” (1962), a boxed set of four tiny volumes
comprising “Alligators All Around,” “Chicken Soup With Rice,” “One Was Johnny” and “Pierre.”
In September, a new picture book by Mr. Sendak, “Bumble-Ardy”
— the first in 30 years for which he produced both text and
illustrations — was issued by HarperCollins Publishers. The book, which
spent five weeks on the New York Times children’s best-seller list,
tells the not-altogether-lighthearted story of an orphaned pig (his
parents are eaten) who gives himself a riotous birthday party.
A posthumous picture book, “My Brother’s Book” — a poem written and
illustrated by Mr. Sendak and inspired by his love for his late brother,
Jack — is scheduled to be published next February.
Mr. Sendak’s work was the subject of critical studies and major
exhibitions; in the second half of his career, he was also renowned as a
designer of theatrical sets. His art graced the writing of other
eminent authors for children and adults, including Hans Christian
Andersen, Leo Tolstoy, Herman Melville, William Blake and Isaac Bashevis
Singer.
In book after book, Mr. Sendak upended the staid, centuries-old
tradition of American children’s literature, in which young heroes and
heroines were typically well scrubbed and even better behaved; nothing
really bad ever happened for very long; and everything was tied up at
the end in a neat, moralistic bow.
Headstrong and Bossy
Mr. Sendak’s characters, by contrast, are headstrong, bossy, even obnoxious. (In “Pierre,”
“I don’t care!” is the response of the small eponymous hero to
absolutely everything.) His pictures are often unsettling. His plots are
fraught with rupture: children are kidnapped, parents disappear, a dog
lights out from her comfortable home.
A largely self-taught illustrator, Mr. Sendak was at his finest a shtetl
Blake, portraying a luminous world, at once lovely and dreadful,
suspended between wakefulness and dreaming. In so doing, he was able to
convey both the propulsive abandon and the pervasive melancholy of
children’s interior lives.
His visual style could range from intricately crosshatched scenes that
recalled 19th-century prints to airy watercolors reminiscent of Chagall
to bold, bulbous figures inspired by the comic books he loved all his
life, with outsize feet that the page could scarcely contain. He never
did learn to draw feet, he often said.
In 1964, the American Library Association awarded Mr. Sendak the Caldecott Medal,
considered the Pulitzer Prize of children’s book illustration, for
“Where the Wild Things Are.” In simple, incantatory language, the book
told the story of Max, a naughty boy who rages at his mother and is sent
to his room without supper. A pocket Odysseus, Max promptly sets sail:
And he sailed off through night and day
and in and out of weeks
and almost over a year
to where the wild things are.
There, Max leads the creatures in a frenzied rumpus before sailing home, anger spent, to find his supper waiting.
As portrayed by Mr. Sendak, the wild things are deliciously grotesque:
huge, snaggletoothed, exquisitely hirsute and glowering maniacally. He
always maintained he was drawing his relatives — who, in his memory at
least, had hovered like a pack of middle-aged gargoyles above the
childhood sickbed to which he was often confined.
Maurice Bernard Sendak was born in Brooklyn on June 10, 1928; his
father, Philip, worked in the garment district of Manhattan. Family
photographs show the infant Maurice, or Murray as he was then known, as a
plump, round-faced, slanting-eyed, droopy-lidded, arching-browed
creature — looking, in other words, exactly like a baby in a Maurice
Sendak illustration. Mr. Sendak adored drawing babies, in all their
fleshy petulance.
A frail child beset by a seemingly endless parade of illnesses, Mr.
Sendak was reared, he said afterward, in a world of looming terrors: the
Depression; World War II;
the Holocaust, in which many of his European relatives perished; the
seemingly infinite vulnerability of children to danger. He experienced
the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby
in 1932 as a personal torment: if that fair-haired, blue-eyed
princeling could not be kept safe, what certain peril lay in store for
him, little Murray Sendak, in his humble apartment in Bensonhurst?
An image from the Lindbergh crime scene — a ladder leaning against the
side of a house — would find its way into “Outside Over There,” in which
a baby is carried off by goblins.
As Mr. Sendak grew up — lower class, Jewish, gay — he felt permanently
shunted to the margins of things. “All I wanted was to be straight so my
parents could be happy,” he told The New York Times in a 2008
interview. “They never, never, never knew.”
His lifelong melancholia showed in his work, in picture books like “We
Are All in the Dumps With Jack and Guy” (1993), a parable about homeless
children in the age of AIDS. It showed in his habits. He could be
dyspeptic and solitary, working in his white clapboard home deep in the
Connecticut countryside with only Mozart, Melville, Mickey Mouse and his
dogs for company.
It showed in his everyday interactions with people, especially those
blind to the seriousness of his enterprise. “A woman came up to me the
other day and said, ‘You’re the kiddie-book man!’ ” Mr. Sendak told Vanity Fair last year.“I wanted to kill her.”
But Mr. Sendak could also be warm and forthright, if not quite
gregarious. He was a man of many enthusiasms — for music, art,
literature, argument and the essential rightness of children’s
perceptions of the world around them. He was also a mentor to a
generation of younger writers and illustrators for children, several of
whom, including Arthur Yorinks, Richard Egielski and Paul O. Zelinsky,
went on to prominent careers of their own.
Long Hours in Bed
As far back as he could remember, Mr. Sendak had loved to draw. That and
looking out the window had helped him pass the long hours in bed. While
he was still in high school — at Lafayette in Brooklyn — he worked part
time for All-American Comics, filling in backgrounds for book versions
of the “Mutt and Jeff” comic strip. His first professional illustrations
were for a physics textbook, “Atomics for the Millions,” published in
1947.
In 1948, at 20, he took a job building window displays for F. A. O.
Schwarz. Through the store’s children’s book buyer, he was introduced to
Ursula Nordstrom, the distinguished editor of children’s books at
Harper & Row. The meeting, the start of a long, fruitful
collaboration, led to Mr. Sendak’s first children’s book commission:
illustrating “The Wonderful Farm,” by Marcel Aymé, published in 1951.
Under Ms. Nordstrom’s guidance, Mr. Sendak went on to illustrate books
by other well-known children’s authors, including several by Ruth
Krauss, notably “A Hole Is to Dig” (1952), and Else Holmelund Minarik’s
“Little Bear” series. The first title he wrote and illustrated himself, “Kenny’s Window,” published in 1956, was a moody, dreamlike story about a lonely boy’s inner life.
Mr. Sendak’s books were often a window on his own experience. “Higglety Pigglety Pop! Or, There Must Be More to Life” was a valentine to Jennie, his beloved Sealyham terrier, who died shortly before the book was published.
At the start of the story, Jennie, who has everything a dog could want —
including “a round pillow upstairs and a square pillow downstairs” —
packs her bags and sets off on her own, pining for adventure. She finds
it on the stage of the World Mother Goose Theatre, where she becomes a
leading lady. Every day, and twice on Saturdays, Jennie, who looks
rather like a mop herself, eats a mop made out of salami. This makes her
very happy.
“Hello,” Jennie writes in a satisfyingly articulate letter to her
master. “As you probably noticed, I went away forever. I am very
experienced now and very famous. I am even a star. ... I get plenty to
drink too, so don’t worry.”
By contrast, the huge, flat, brightly colored illustrations of “In the
Night Kitchen,” the story of a boy’s journey through a fantastic
nocturnal cityscape, are a tribute to the New York of Mr. Sendak’s
childhood, recalling the 1930s films and comic books he adored all his
life. (The three bakers who toil in the night kitchen are the spit and
image of Oliver Hardy.)
Mr. Sendak’s later books could be much darker. “Brundibar” (2003), with
text by the playwright Tony Kushner, is a picture book based on an opera
performed by the children of the Theresienstadt concentration camp. The
opera, also called “Brundibar,” had been composed in 1938 by Hans
Krasa, a Czech Jew who later died in Auschwitz.
‘Melodramatic Menace’
Reviewing the book
in The New York Times Book Review, the novelist and children’s book
author Gregory Maguire called it “a capering picture book crammed with
melodramatic menace and comedy both low and grand.” He added: “In a
career that spans 50 years and counting, as Sendak’s does, there are
bound to be lesser works. ‘Brundibar’ is not lesser than anything.”
With Mr. Kushner, Mr. Sendak collaborated on a stage version of the opera, performed in 2006 at the New Victory Theater in New York.
Despite its wild popularity, Mr. Sendak’s work was not always well
received. Some early reviews of “Where the Wild Things Are” expressed
puzzlement and outright unease. Writing in Ladies’ Home Journal, the
psychologist Bruno Bettelheim took Mr. Sendak to task for punishing Max:
“The basic anxiety of the child is desertion,” Mr. Bettelheim wrote. “To
be sent to bed alone is one desertion, and without food is the second
desertion.” (Mr. Bettelheim admitted that he had not actually read the
book.)
“In the Night Kitchen,” which depicts its young hero, Mickey, in the
nude, prompted many school librarians to bowdlerize the book by drawing a
diaper over Mickey’s nether region.
But these were minority responses. Mr. Sendak’s other awards include the
Hans Christian Andersen Award for Illustration, the Laura Ingalls
Wilder Award and, in 1996, the National Medal of the Arts, presented by
President Bill Clinton. Twenty-two of his titles have been named New
York Times best illustrated books of the year.
Many of Mr. Sendak’s books had second lives on stage and screen. Among
the most notable adaptations are the operas “Where the Wild Things Are”
and “Higglety Pigglety Pop!” by the British composer Oliver Knussen, and
Carole King’s “Really Rosie,”
a musical version of “The Sign on Rosie’s Door,” which appeared on
television as an animated special in 1975 and on the Off Broadway stage
in 1980.
In 2009, a feature film version of “Where the Wild Things Are”
— part live action, part animated — by the director Spike Jonze opened
to favorable notices. (With Lance Bangs, Mr. Jonze also directed “Tell
Them Anything You Want,” a documentary film about Mr. Sendak first
broadcast on HBO that year.)
In the 1970s, Mr. Sendak began designing sets and costumes for
adaptations of his own work and, eventually, the work of others. His
first venture was Mr. Knussen’s “Wild Things,” for which Mr. Sendak also
wrote the libretto. Performed in a scaled-down version in Brussels in
1980, the opera had its full premiere four years later, to great
acclaim, staged in London by the Glyndebourne Touring Opera.
With the theater director Frank Corsaro, he also created sets for
several venerable operas, among them Mozart’s “Magic Flute,” performed
by the Houston Grand Opera in 1980, and Leos Janacek’s “Cunning Little
Vixen” for the New York City Opera in 1981.
For the Pacific Northwest Ballet, Mr. Sendak designed sets and costumes
for a 1983 production of Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker”; a film version was
released in 1986.
Among Mr. Sendak’s recent books is his only pop-up book, “Mommy?,”
published by Scholastic in 2006, with a scenario by Mr. Yorinks and
paper engineering by Matthew Reinhart.
Mr. Sendak’s companion of a half-century, Eugene Glynn, a psychiatrist
who specialized in the treatment of young people, died in 2007. Mr.
Sendak’s personal assistant, Lynn Caponera, worked for him almost as
long while living at his Ridgefield home. No immediate family members
survive. Though he understood children deeply, Mr. Sendak by no means
valorized them unconditionally. “Dear Mr. Sun Deck ...” he could drone
with affected boredom, imitating the semiliterate forced-march school
letter-writing projects of which he was the frequent, if dubious,
beneficiary.
But he cherished the letters that individual children sent him unbidden,
which burst with the sparks that his work had ignited.
“Dear Mr. Sendak,” read one, from an 8-year-old boy. “How much does it
cost to get to where the wild things are? If it is not expensive, my
sister and I would like to spend the summer there.”
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