Sendak was, himself, the real deal “wild thing.”īorn and raised in Brooklyn, New York to Jewish Polish immigrant parents, Sendak occupied an “outsider” status in multiple senses of the word. He explored his own past, and mined and reflected upon his own experiences as a queer, Jewish child learning to grow up in the world.
Sendak, along with literary innovator and legendary editor Ursula Nordstrom, created a book that would become emblematic of the richness and depth of children’s picture books. Rather than patronizing his young readers, painting an illusion of childhood “innocence,” he respected them by acknowledging the terrifying reality of what it meant to be a child, someone who existed on the margins of life, who possessed both intense vulnerability and incredible insight, unfiltered by adult biases.
Maurice Sendak broke new literary and artistic ground by turning to the darker realities of childhood, illustrating a blend of anger, frustration, and other complicated emotions among the monsters he painted. Within the realm of children’s books, a space previously marked by the conservative, didactic messaging of Dick and Jane stories, Sendak was a breath of fresh air, having written a child protagonist who was as messy and loud and chaotic as he longed to be.
Adults were puzzled as their children, once reluctant readers, dragged them to the library over and over again to read this story, one that was unlike any other at the time. When Where the Wild Things Are was first published in 1963 by what was then Harper & Row Books, no one predicted how it would take the world of children’s literature by storm.
Maybe you’re familiar with this story: A young boy in a white wolf costume is sent to his room after he runs around the house, terrorizing his family, screaming at his mother, “I’LL EAT YOU UP!” After being sent to bed with no dinner, the boy finds himself in a strange new world, filled with vines and trees and terrible creatures he calls the “Wild Things.” He becomes the king, the wildest thing of them all. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
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