Author: Maurice Sendak

Brooklyn made him. Maurice Sendak was born there on 10 June 1928 to Polish Jewish immigrants, Philip and Sadie Sendak, and at twenty he was building window displays for the FAO Schwarz toy shop, which is how the Harper editor Ursula Nordstrom found him. She published Where the Wild Things Are in 1963. Adults objected that Max's beasts would frighten children and that a boy sent to bed without supper made a poor hero; the children's librarians gave it the Caldecott Medal the following year regardless, and it has stayed in print ever since. Sendak took the creatures from the Yiddish vilde chaya his relatives aimed at badly behaved children. In the Night Kitchen followed in 1970 and drew library challenges of its own. He received the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1970, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal in 1983 and the National Medal of Arts in 1996. He lived for fifty years with the psychoanalyst Eugene Glynn and spoke about it publicly only in 2008, a year after Glynn died. Sendak died on 8 May 2012, aged 83.