MAURICE SENDAK:MAURICE SENDAK, who has died aged 83, was both one of the most individual and most successful illustrators of the 20th century. Since 1951 his 90-odd titles have sold nearly 30 million copies in the US alone. His renowned work Where the Wild Things Are (1963), with worldwide sales of more than 19 million, was a turning point not only in his own career but in the history of children's books.
The bulk of his work lay in illustrating other writers, but it was his own, far fewer, books which brought him countless international awards and academic honours, and made him the subject of many a thesis.
At first, Where the Wild Things Are and its follow-up, In the Night Kitchen (1970), caused outrage at their robust portrayal of children’s fears and aggression. The Wild Things were actually modelled, he said, on his Jewish uncles and aunts who racketed around his childhood, unpredictably and, on the whole, in a well-intentioned if slightly threatening vein.
In 2009, Sendak, discussing Spike Jonze’s film version of Where the Wild Things Are, rejected parental concerns about the story being too scary: “I would tell them to go to hell,” Sendak said. If children couldn’t handle it, they should “go home. Or wet your pants. Do whatever you like.”
Sendak was born in Brooklyn, New York, the youngest of the three children of an impecunious dressmaker. His parents had been Jewish immigrants from Poland (in no way, he would emphasise, Polish); his father, the son of a rabbi, had run away from home and been disowned when he went to America, but his mother’s family was so poor they sent her to America at 16 to work in sweatshops until she could bring over her mother and brothers.
Mickey Mouse was born six months after Sendak, and became his lifelong obsession: his pretty 1790 New England house in the woodlands of Ridgefield, Connecticut, was crammed with Mickey Mouse collectors’ items.
He portrayed himself as a glum, cantankerous figure with no need of a social life, working seven days a week with an ordered routine.
His dog was his idea of perfect company and he declared Jennie, the Sealyham heroine for whom Higglety Pigglety Pop! (1967) was created as she lay dying, to have been the love of his life.
Another great love was his sister, Natalie: he was a sickly child, constantly quarantined (“I learned early on that it was a very chancy business, being alive”) and missing school, so Natalie, nine years older, was always having him “dumped on her”, and he remembered both her great love and her demonic rages.
Outside Over There (1981), the last of the trilogy that began with Where the Wild Things Are and continued with In the Night Kitchen, was his most personal book, and his favourite, a tribute to Natalie “who is Ida, very brave, very strong, very frightening, taking care of me”.
Although he would have dearly liked to have children, he never married and never told his parents that he was gay: “All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy,” he said in a New York Times interview in 2008. “They never, never, never knew.”
He had written and illustrated his first book by the age of six. In high school, which he loathed, he worked for All-American Comics, filling in backgrounds and storylines for the Mutt and Jeff strip. In 1948 he and his brother Jack began to make wooden toys, which led to him being a window designer in the FAO Schwarz toyshop. At Christmas, he filled the shop front with drawings from A Christmas Carol. A Harper and Row editor, Ursula Nordstrom, asked him to illustrate The Wonderful Farm by Marcel Ayme and became a lifelong friend.
In 1979 the opera director Frank Corsaro asked him to design The Magic Flute, followed by Prokofiev’s Love of Three Oranges at Glyndebourne and, in 1987, Ravel’s L’Heure Espagnole and L’Enfant et les Sortileges.
He was artistic director of a children’s theatre set up by Robert Redford’s Sundance company, and founded the Night Kitchen, a theatre company for children.
In 2007, Sendak’s partner of 50 years, the psychoanalyst Eugene Glynn, died. During Glynn’s final illness, Sendak wrote Bumble-Ardy (2011), his first book for children in 30 years.
Maurice Bernard Sendak, children’s author and illustrator, born June 10th, 1928; died May 8th, 2012