Maurice Sendak

Remembering the Creator of Where the Wild Things Are:

Children's book artist Maurice Sendak, who reassured us about the scary monsters in the shadows of our bedrooms by bringing them out and putting them on the printed page, passed away this week at age 83.

Here's his New York Times obituary, which playfully notes that Sendak's classic works -- 1963's Where the Wild Things Are, 1970's In the Night Kitchen and 1981's Outside Over There, among others -- were "roundly praised, intermittently censored and occasionally eaten." Sendak, a gay man whose own childhood was haunted by the Holocaust, in which some of his relatives perished, grew up feeling like a lonely outsider.

He turned his own inner torments into art that has comforted fearful children of several generations. The Times obituary quotes this letter from an 8-year-old reader to the author: "Dear Mr. Sendak, how much does it cost to get to where the wild things are? If it is not expensive, my sister and I would like to spend the summer there."




Source:
 http://www.secondact.com/2012/05/hot-topics