A. Waller Hastings
Northern State University
Aberdeen, SD 57401
“…we can get away with things in children’s books that nobody in the adult world ever can because the assumption is that the audience is too innocent to pick it up. And in truth they’re the only audience that does pick it up.”
- Maurice Sendak (Sutton 691)
Sendak was born in New York in 1928 and grew up in Brooklyn, the son of Jewish immigrants. He has described his childhood as “colored with memories of village life in Poland, never actually experienced but passed on to me as a persuasive reality by my immigrant parents” (qtd. in Cech, 200). He has acknowledged significant inspiration from the sights, sounds, and experiences of his childhood, interpreted through a unique imagination. For instance, the Wild Things of his best-known book were inspired by his aunts and uncles, who “looked like toothy monsters” to the young Sendak, and seemed to threaten to smother him with their attention. His severe childhood trauma on hearing of the Lindberg kidnapping contributed to the emotional power of Outside Over There, and throughout his career he has dealt in various ways with the Holocaust, most recently in Brundibar.
He began his career as an illustrator in 1951 and first achieved major recognition with A Hole Is to Dig (1952), to a text by Ruth Kraus. It was a black and white book, with sketches rather than paintings, and was followed by several other collaborations with Kraus. Sendak’s children seemed to be something new in illustration: a little dumpy, rumpled -- not “perfect” middle-class-type children as prevailed at the time (Bader 424).
He began working with colors on Charlotte and the White Horse (1955), but his typical style is not to compose in color but to use color to emphasize line and form. His work is influenced by a variety of other artists, including Blake, Antoine Watteau, Marc Chagall, Francisco Goya, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse (Bader 498).
With Kenny’s Window (1956), Sendak began the exploration of the psychological fears and yearnings of childhood -- specifically, those of his own childhood: “. . . to write about how one felt as a child was something new” (Bader 506). Sendak is perhaps among the most Freudian of writers/artists, as various interviews clearly acknowledge.
This exploration of childhood reached its earliest and perhaps best-known peak in Where the Wild Things Are, which won the Caldecott medal in 1964. That book combines elements of design and fantastic narration (concisely conveyed in just a few sentences) to examine the child’s response to anger; Sendak considers it to be the first volume of a trilogy (along with In the Night Kitchen and Outside Over There) exploring children’s responses to strong emotions.
Sendak says of the book:
Where the Wild Things Are has permitted me to do all kinds of books that I probably never would have done had it not been so popular. I think I took good advantage of that popularity to illustrate books that I passionately wanted to do without having to worry if they were commercial or not. (Sutton 687)
With Hector Protector and As I Went Over the Water (1965), his next book after WT2A, Sendak increasingly relied on wordless pictorial sequences to tell a story, often “playing the pictures against a straight-faced text” in adaptations of folk stories and nursery rhymes (Bader 517). His independent illustration of often fairly obscure traditional materials, allowing an original interpretation in pcitures, was a new development in picture books (Bader 518). In addition to exploring traditional materials, Sendak also turned his artistic talent to help recover lesser-known writers of the past, notably George MacDonald.
In the Night Kitchen (1970) was Sendak’s first picture book in several years (since Hector Protector). He had published illustrated books (i.e., books that were more text-intensive) but no picture books per se (Bader 518). This book received a Caldecott Honor citation and was published as Sendak’s international reputation was soaring; he received the Hans Christian Andersen medal that year for his contributions to children’s literature.
Despite the commercial success and creative freedom it provided for him, though Sendak says WTWTA isn’t his best book (Sutton 688). That honor would go to his “capstone achievement,” the third volume of the trilogy, Outside Over There. It is perhaps the most difficult of his books, since it employs so many evidently symbolic images that have personal significance for Sendak but may not be apparent to the average reader -- adult or child. The author called Outside Over There, the story of a girl’s search for her kidnapped baby sister, “the most painful experience of my creative life. It brought on a catastrophe. It was so hard it caused me to have a breakdown.” (Sutton 689) While he considers it his best work, “I can take no pleasure in that,” he says (Sutton 690)
Sendak’s works have been adapted for film and opera, with Sendak himself contributing artistically to the stage sets and the adapted scripts. In part, this reflects his ongoing interest in film (he fondly recalls the experience of going to the movies in New York, an experience reflected in his use of Oliver Hardy in INK, and has particularly acknowledged the importance of Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse in his imaginative development).
Sendak and Awards:
Ruth Kraus’s A Very Special House, 1954 Caldecott Honor book
Meinert DeJong’s Hurry Home, Candy, 1954 Newbery Honor book
DeJong’s Shadrach, 1954 Newbery Honor book
DeJong’s The Wheel on the School, 1955 Newbery Medal winner
DeJong’s The House of Sixty Fathers, 1957 Newbery Honor book
DeJong’s Along Came a Dog, 1959 Newbery Honor book
Sesyle Joslin’s What Do You Say, Dear?, 1959 Caldecott Honor book
Janice May Udry’s The Moon Jumpers, 1960 Caldecott Honor book
Elsie Minarik’s Little Bear’s Visit, 1962 Caldecott Honor book
Charlotte Zolotow’s Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present, 1963 Caldecott Honor book
Where the Wild Things Are, 1964 Caldecott Medal winner
Randall Jarrell’s The Animal Family, 1966 Newbery Honor book
Hans Christian Andersen Award - 1970
In the Night Kitchen, 1971 Caldecott Honor book
Outside Over There, 1982 Caldecott Honor book, 1981 Globe/Horn Book winner
Laura Ingalls Wilder Award - 1983
SOURCES: Barbara Bader, American Picturebooks from Noah's Ark to the Beast Within, New York: Macmillan, 1976; George Bodmer, “‘The night Max wore his wolf suit’: Borders between Childhood and the Animal Story,” ChLA Annual Meeting, Roanoke, VA, 23 June, 2000; Kara Keeling and Scott Pollard, “Power, Food, and Eating in Maurice Sendak and Henrik Drescher: Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, and The Boy Who Ate Around,” Children’s Literature in Education 30, 2 (1999) 127-143; Leonard S. Marcus, A Caldecott Celebration: Six Artists and Their Paths to the Caldecott Medal, New York: Walker, 1998; Leonard S. Marcus, “A Second Look: Where the Wild Things Are,” Horn Book Nov/Dec 2003, 703-706; Ellen Handler Spitz, Inside Picture Books, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999; Jon C. Stott and Christine Doyle Francis, “‘Home’ and ‘Not Home’ in Children’s Stories: Getting There – and Being Worth It,” Children’s Literature in Education 24, 3 (1993) 223-233; Roger Sutton, “An Interview with Maurice Sendak,” Horn Book Nov/Dec 2003, 687-699.
On-line resources on Maurice Sendak:
This page last updated on July 17, 2007