Maurice Sendak
Maurice Sendak
Maurice Bernard Sendakwas an American illustrator and writer of children's books. He became widely known for his book Where the Wild Things Are, first published in 1963. Born to Jewish-Polish parents, his childhood was affected by the death of many of his family members during the Holocaust. Besides Where the Wild Things Are, Sendak also wrote works such as In the Night Kitchen, Outside Over There, and illustrated many works by other authors including the Little Bear books by Else...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionChildren's Author
Date of Birth10 June 1928
CityBrooklyn, NY
CountryUnited States of America
People from New York have been calling, to see if I'm still alive. When I answer the phone, you can hear the disappointment in their voice.
What most people wanted was a reproduction of the book, because the book made money,
The magic of childhood is the strangeness of childhood — the uniqueness that makes us see things that other people don't see.
I'm getting old. And I'm disappointed in everything just the way old people traditionally, boringly are. That bothers me because is it too traditional? Am I not fighting hard enough? I don't feel the fight. I don't feel it.
I really don't like the city anymore. You get pushed and harassed and people grope you. It's too tumultuous. It's too crazy.
Then one day my sister abandoned me at the 1939 World's Fair, and that incident is the essence of In the Night Kitchen. I was standing there with hundreds of other people waving back at the little midgets dressed like bakers when I turned around and my sister was gone! The next thing I know I'm screaming and crying and policemen are taking me to a big place with tons of kids who had all been abandoned like me. At least I was old enough to give them a name and an address.
God, I had great people in my life.
Thank God that Bumble-Ardy's parents are dead so we don't have to wonder what they did to him. We only know that they were famous, and famous people have unhappy children for the most part. They don't have the time to take care of them. So he's a troubled pig-boy, a kid you've got to watch.
In another project I worked on just a few years ago, a staging of Peter and the Wolf, which I translated into Yiddish and sang on a stage in New York City. Thank God very few people knew I was doing it! But the kids in the audience loved it - even though it was all in Yiddish.
I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can't stop them. They leave me and I love them more.
I've convinced myself - I hope I'm right - that children despair of you if you don't tell them the truth.
Do parents sit down and tell their kids everything? I don't know. I don't know.
It dawned on me that art was the way I could survive.
I'm still as enamored and turned on by work as I was when I was young.