Maurice Sendak Wild Things

Maurice Sendak: Childhood, Fear, and the Radical Picture Book

Maurice Sendak (1928-2012) is widely considered the most important American picture book illustrator and author of the twentieth century. His work challenged the prevailing consensus that children's books should be comforting and sanitized, insisting instead that children experience the full spectrum of emotion — rage, terror, desire, loneliness — and that picture books should honor that reality.

Where the Wild Things Are (1963)

Published by Harper & Row in 1963, Where the Wild Things Are tells the story of Max, sent to bed without supper after a tantrum, who imagines sailing to a land of monsters, becomes their king, and eventually returns home to find his supper still warm. The book was initially rejected by several publishers and criticized by child psychologists upon publication for being potentially frightening to young readers. It won the Caldecott Medal in 1964 and has never been out of print.

Sendak's visual approach in Wild Things is fundamentally sequential: the illustrations begin as small vignettes surrounded by white border and expand across the spread as Max's fantasy intensifies, until the three-page "wild rumpus" wordless sequence fills the entire spread with no text at all. The monsters are simultaneously terrifying and lovable — hairy, horned, clawed, yellow-eyed, but with the slightly confused expressions of large animals who don't quite know what to do with themselves.

The artwork is pen-and-ink crosshatching over watercolor wash. Every page is rendered in dense hatched line building up to rich dark values, with a warm but slightly alien palette — deep greens, purples, golden yellows under forest canopies.

In the Night Kitchen (1970)

Sendak's follow-up, In the Night Kitchen, is still more psychologically complex: a young boy named Mickey falls naked through the night into a giant Art Deco baking city operated by identical Oliver Hardy cooks. The book's nudity, surreal logic, and Freudian undertones have landed it on banned-books lists in several American school districts — which Sendak considered absurd. The artwork here shifts from hatching to a warmer, rounder line influenced by Winsor McCay's Little Nemo comic strip and 1930s advertising illustration.

Legacy

Sendak illustrated more than eighty books by other authors, including his beloved 1962 illustrations for the Nutshell Library series, before his death in 2012. Spike Jonze's 2009 live-action/puppet film adaptation of Wild Things is an important contemporary extension of the visual world.