The writer who saw dark side of childhood

Maurice Sendak, the children’s book author and illustrator who saw the sometimes dark side of childhood in books like Where The Wild Things Are, has died aged 83.

...despite his varied resumé, Mr Sendak accepted − and embraced − the label ‘kiddie-book author’...

“He died on Tuesday in Danbury, Connecticut. The cause was complication from a recent stroke,” said Erin Crum, at HarperCollins in New York.

Where The Wild Things Are earned Mr Sendak a prestigious Caldecott Medal for the best children’s book of 1964 and became a hit movie in 2009. President Bill Clinton awarded Mr Sendak a National Medal of the Arts in 1996 for his vast portfolio of work.

Mr Sendak did not limit his career to a safe and successful formula of conventional children’s books, though it was the pictures he did for wholesome works such as Ruth Krauss’s A Hole Is To Dig and Else Holmelund Minarik’s Little Bear that launched his career.

Where The Wild Things Are, about a boy named Max who goes on a journey through his own imagination after he is sent to bed without supper, was quite controversial when it was published, and his quirky and borderline scary illustrations for E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Nutcracker did not have the sugar coating featured in other versions.

Mr Sendak also created costumes for ballets and staged operas, including the Czech opera Brundibar, which he also put on paper with collaborator Pulitzer-winning playwright Tony Kushner in 2003.

He designed the Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Nutcracker production that later became a TV film and he served as producer of various animated TV series based on his illustrations, including Seven Little Monsters, George and Martha and Little Bear.

But despite his varied resumé, Mr Sendak accepted − and embraced − the label “kiddie-book author”.

“I write books that seem more suitable for children, and that’s OK with me. They are a better audience and tougher critics. Kids tell you what they think, not what they think they should think,” he said in 2003.

When director Spike Jonez made the movie version of Where The Wild Things Are, Mr Sendak said he urged the director to remember his view that childhood is not all sweetness and light. And he was happy with the result.

“In plain terms, a child is a complicated creature who can drive you crazy” Mr Sendak said in 2009. “There’s a cruelty to childhood, there’s an anger. And I did not want to reduce Max to the trite image of the good little boy that you find in too many books.”

Mr Sendak’s own life was clouded by the shadow of the Holocaust. He had said that the events of World War II were the root of his raw and honest artistic style.

Born in 1928 and raised in Brooklyn, Mr Sendak said he remembered the tears shed by his Jewish-Polish immigrant parents as they’d get news of atrocities and the deaths of relatives and friends.

“My childhood was about thinking about the kids over there (in Europe). My burden is living for those who didn’t,” he said.

Mr Sendak received the international Hans Christian Andersen medal for illustration in 1970.

In 1983 he won the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award from the American Library Association.