Sendak, Maurice

Maurice Sendak, in full Maurice Bernard Sendak, (born June 10, 1928, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.—died May 8, 2012, Danbury, Connecticut), American artist and writer best known for his illustrated children’s books.

Sendak was the son of Polish immigrants and received his formal art training at the Art Students League of New York. While a student there, he drew backgrounds for All-American Comics and did window displays for a toy store. The first children’s books he illustrated were Marcel Aymé’s The Wonderful Farm (1951) and Ruth Krauss’s A Hole Is to Dig (1952). Both were successful, and Sendak went on to illustrate more than 80 children’s books by a number of writers, including Meindert De Jong, Else Holmelund Minarik, and Randall Jarrell.

Maurice Sendak, Spike Jonze, and Max Records

With Kenny’s Window (1956), he began writing some of the stories that he illustrated. These include the tiny four-volume Nutshell Library (1962) and his innovative trilogy composed of Where the Wild Things Are (1963; winner of the 1964 Caldecott Medal), In the Night Kitchen (1970), and Outside over There (1981); a film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, directed by Spike Jonze, was released in 2009. Among Sendak’s other works are Higglety Pigglety Pop!; or, There Must Be More to Life (1967), Seven Little Monsters (1977), and Bumble-Ardy (2011). He also illustrated the pop-up book Mommy? (2006). Sendak elegized his brother in the posthumously published narrative poem My Brother’s Book (2013).

In addition to his children’s books, Sendak was involved in numerous other projects. In 1975 he wrote and directed Really Rosie, an animated television special based on some of the children in his stories. It was expanded into a musical play in 1978. In addition to creating opera versions of some of his own stories—including Where the Wild Things Are—Sendak designed a number of other works for the stage, notably the city of Houston’s production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute in 1980. In 1983 he designed a production of Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker for Pacific Northwest Ballet in Seattle.

Sendak published Caldecott & Co.: Notes on Books and Pictures, a collection of essays and reviews on writers and illustrators, in 1988. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1996. The Art of Maurice Sendak by Selma G. Lanes was published in 1980.