He developed wide cultural tastes, adoring the work of William Blake, Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson, illustrators like Randolph Caldecott, and classical composers including Mozart, Wagner and Beethoven. I was very ill I had scarlet fever… my parents were afraid I wouldn't survive."Īs Sendak grew into adulthood, he retained a direct connection to those intense childhood emotions. "But I was afraid because I heard it around me. He was also fearful of dying: "I think a lot of children are afraid of death," he told Saul Braun of The New York Times in 1970. "Childhood suffering is intense." He even found the way his mother expressed her affection for him alarming: she played odd games and would jump out and scare him, shouting "whoot!". "Children are extraordinarily vulnerable and have few defences," he told Muriel Harris in a 1970 interview for the journal Elementary English. Sendak struggled with anxious feelings from a young age. When ill health left him confined for long periods at home as a child, he developed strong attachments to particular books, toys and objects in his room, and constantly drew pictures. He was passionate about the cinema, especially Disney films, and an avid reader. He was obsessed with storytelling from a young age, partly thanks to the wildly imaginative tales his father recounted to entertain him and his older siblings, Natalie and Jack. The son of Polish Jewish immigrants who arrived in the US before World War One, Sendak was born in Brooklyn in 1928. The story of a loveable rascal called Max whose mother sends him to his room for causing mayhem, it takes a more mysterious turn when, left alone, Max conjures a vivid world of towering trees and vines and sails off to become king of an island of party-loving monsters, before getting lonely and returning home. Yet, with its unforgettable colour palette of pinks, blues and greens and its depiction of perennial childhood joys like tree swinging and piggyback rides, it looks as fresh as the day it was born. Where the Wild Things Are turns 60 this November. The 21st Century’s greatest children’s books Read more about BBC Culture's 100 greatest children's books: Most importantly though, it has indeed captivated generations of children thirsty for mischief, mastery and a cracking wild rumpus. For this poll, children's authors and experts from Singapore and Iceland to Portugal and Peru voted for it in their droves, with one respondent, Pam Dix, chair of the UK section of the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY), calling it "a perfect, multi-layered picture book that reveals new dimensions on each reading". It has inspired films, songs, books, an opera and even a spoof on The Simpsons. Of course, far from only appealing to children, after initially sending shockwaves around the literary establishment, over the decades the book has beguiled almost everyone who has encountered it, young and old, from world leaders to film directors. Accepting the coveted Caldecott medal in 1964, an annual award honouring the "most distinguished American picture book for children", the author Maurice Sendak addressed the rumbles of disapproval his winning book had received from some quarters about it being too frightening by wryly commenting, "Where the Wild Things Are was not meant to please everybody – only children."
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