Children's Writer Maurice Sendak

Maurice Sendak is undoubtedly a force in both literature and art. His beginnings were humble, the son of Polish immigrants in Brooklyn, and he grew up surrounded by relatives who had survived the Holocaust.

Born in 1928, he was nine when Hitler began taking bits and pieces of Europe, and when he was entering the teen years and being bar mitzvahed, most of his parents' families in Europe had perished in concentration camps.

In 1999, he confided to a reporter his memories of those days. "I think my mother's relatives comically became the wild things. At the time I was completely unsympathetic to these people. I was embarrassed-that's the snobbishness of childhood" (Winerman, 1999, 31). This snobbishness disappeared as he grew older, and as a partial understanding of the events in Europe came into focus for him.

In the 1950s, while working as a window designer and clerk at New York's incredible toy emporium F.A.O. Schwartz, an editor at Harper and Brothers publishers, Ursula Nordstrom, saw some of his window drawings and convinced him that he should try his hand at illustrating children's books.

This was an exciting occurrence for Sendak, who often spent cozy evenings listening to his father weave fantastic tales and stories. Sickly and weak as a child, he turned inward and found a strong creative streak. He would design toys, draw illustrations for books his older brothers were creating, and when he was 19, published his first book, an illustrated guide to

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tures abide. Max is confronted by monsters, but his goal is to master and control those monsters. Finding control is what is each child must do (as must most adults) to make sense of the world. In many ways, Max is the archetypal child, and the monsters on Max's island are big and hairy but are they scary? Max doesn't seem to think so. In fact, he controls those monsters. When Sendak has the monsters cry "Please don't go!" he is granting Max the power to say no and sail back to bed. Stevenson (1996), discussing the critical reaction to Sendak's "scariness" observes that the world is filled with dangers, and we "understandably wish to keep the children for whom we are responsible from harm. Sometimes, however, attempts to protect children end up depriving them in ways we didn't intend, and for reasons that have more to do with adult rather than childish vulnerabilities" (Stevenson, 1996, 305). Among his works, there are more works that are charming than scary, and his entire canon is versatile and almost epic in scope. For instance, one simply has to compare the works he has both written and illustrated. His charming We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy (1993) is close in tone and feel to Stevenson's Verses while h

Category: Literature - C