![]() Sendak’s first major group of pictures appeared in A Hole Is to Dig (1952), Ruth Krauss s path-breaking collection of “first definitions” that children themselves had invented to describe their world. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things.”īefore Where the Wild Things Are was published, Sendak had illustrated nearly fifty books written by others, many of them remarkable in their own right, like Else Holmelund Minarik’s “Little Bear” books, a memorable Series of early readers. And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. They Continually cope with frustration as best they can. The “inner” subject that Sendak has explored in many of his books-and what he calls his “obsession” as a writer and artist-are the fantasies that children create to combat an awful fact of childhood.” In accepting the prestigious Caldecott Medal for Where the Wild Things Are, Sendak explained this fact: “From their earliest years, children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions…. ![]() It’s amazing I’ve had success,” he reflects, “because my books are so idiosyncratic and personal and striving for inner things rather than for outer things.” But though Max in his wolf suit and the monsters he tames in Sendak’s classic Where the Wild Things Are (1963) have taken a permanent place in American popular culture aid the global mythology of childhood, Sendak confesses to being baffled by the acclaim his books have won. It is a challenge Sendak has continued to meet in a career that has spanned four decades and has ]ed to Sendak’s creation of the texts and illustrations for more than seventy books, which have sold tens of millions of copies in more than a dozen languages. In the early 1960s, Brian O’Doherty, then the art critic for the New York Times, called Maurice Sendak “one of the most powerful men in the U.S.’ because of his ability to “give shape to the fantasies of millions of children-an awful responsibility.”
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