This is where I keep everything I’ve learned about children’s book author-illustrator Maurice Sendak.

I wrote and recorded an overview of his life here. And his creative process here. Below you’ll find my notes in Q&A format for easy perusing and a bibliography at the end.

His life

Where was he born?

Maurice Sendak was born June 10, 1928 in Brooklyn, New York. He was named after the doctor who helped his mom when he was born. His family called him Murray.

Sendak’s father described him as a happy baby, coming out “almost laughing…like a little bell.” Sendak later said:

“What a start. What a good beginning. What a hopeful sign that was. What did they do? Break the bell?”

What was his family like?

His parents were Jewish-Polish immigrants who were working to bring their families to the United States.

HIs mom was sent over from Poland alone when she was only 16 to rent a room from someone she didn’t know. According to Sendak, it was because she had been causing trouble by flirting with everyone in her village (including Sendak’s father). He described her as:

Never stingy toward her own family or relations…but she was always worried.

HIs father came over after her (even though the family didn’t like that). He was the son of a rabbi who had “prestige and was extremely handsome and devil-may-care.” He was also a tailor (which later influenced Sendak to design costumes) and was known as a great storyteller who wouldn’t hold back on stories about love, death, and survival. Sendak said these stories were his first real inspirations.

Overall he had a difficult relationship with his parents.

“There was no art to child life in my family. They couldn’t figure out life at all. My mom shouldn’t have had children. She didn’t care for children.”

*Interactive wooden toys he made with his siblings*

He had a sister and brother whom he called his chosen parents. They enriched his life with books, creativity, and projects they made together like dynamic wooden toys (which Sendak had in his studio). Creativity helped him survive.

This was one of Sendak’s childhood toys that inspired creative play for him.

What was he like as a child?

He was self-described as a “rigid kid” who was often scared and anxious, especially about starting school.

“Nearly every morning, in order to get there, I had to talk myself out of a state of panic…I couldn’t stand being cloistered with other children, and I was usually so embarrassed that I stammered.”

He was also so scared of the vacuum cleaner that he had to go to the neighbor’s house when his mom was cleaning. (This later inspired the Mama Monster costume in the operatic adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are.)

I was terrified of the vacuum cleaner, untraditionally. I mean people sit around saying…’don’t let kids do that, it’ll be too frightening’ but who would have ever imagined ‘don’t let a kid in a room with a vacuum clearn!’ But when my mother plugged in the vacuum cleaner…and the thing blew up visibly, and the sight of that bag swelling used to just drive me right up the wall, literally.”

He claimed watching Invisible Man as a kid made him an insomniac his whole life.

His main source of anxiety was feeling like he was surrounded by death like:

His parents being very blunt about how he was an “accident baby” that they had tried to get rid of because they couldn’t afford him
Hearing about the Lindbergh baby kidnapping which he said “invested me in children forever.” He confronted this fear head on in Outside Over There and described getting “close to the fire” and having mental breakdowns because the process was so intense.
Witnessing his parents guilt after they heard his dad’s Jewish family members were killed in the concentration camps before they could afford to bring them to the United States. (Sendak said they took it out on their children.)
Witnessing a childhood friend run into traffic to retrieve a ball — though his friend’s mom reassured him it wasn’t his fault, he struggled to talk about it even into his 80s.

Most likely because of these experiences, he was obsessed with the topic of death. his whole life.

"I think a lot of children are afraid of death. But I was afraid because I heard it around me. I was very ill; I had scarlet fever…my parents were afraid I wouldn't survive."

He was even teased by his friends as an adult for how often he talked about it.

“It was the awareness at a very early age of mortality which pervaded my soul and provided me with the basic ingredients of being an artist.”

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What originally inspired him to become an artist?

He was sick a lot as a kid and spent most of his time indoors, observing from the window. This influenced the perspective of his books — many featured windows and movie-like perspectives.

He spent his time drawing and reading comics, especially Mickey Mouse. Fantasia made him want to become an artist.

From the moment I drew my first drawing there was never any question, never any doubt in my young mind that I wanted to be an artist.

Sendak’s first painting age 6 from The Sendak Exhibit

Mickey Mouse was our buddy. My brother and sister and I chewed his gum, brushed our teeth with his toothbrush, played with him in a seemingly endless variety of games…Best of all, our street pal was also a movie star. In the darkened theater, the sudden flash of his brilliant, wild, joyful face—radiating great golden beams—filled me with an intoxicating, unalloyed pleasure.

Sendak loved that him and Mickey were bortn the same year.

What Michelangelo was to a Renaissance child, Walt Disney was to a Brooklyn Jewish child."

How did he get his first big break?

As a young adult, Sendak worked at a toy store while taking art classes at night at the New York Art Students League (even though he hated school and always claimed he taught himself to draw and paint).

*Sendak’s yearbook — he was class artist*

He really loved the class taught by John Groth who encouraged him to leave school and learn by doing. Sendak said he communicated “a sense of the enormous potential for motion, for aliveness in illustration…He himself…showed how much fun creating in it could be.”

His first jobs were textbook illustrations and window dressing at the toy store FAO Schwarz.

In the 1940s, he often explored realistic styles through self-portraits, and later, all of his characters had a little of himself in them.

He was discovered by the great children’s book editor Ursula Nordstrom who eventually got him enough work to quit his other jobs:

“She made me who I am. She gave me a book every year. She kept me working. Can you imagine? Mentorship from a publishing house. She intended that I should be an important illustrator.”

What were his earlier years as a children’s book illustrator like?

He illustrated lots of other people’s books and developed a solid reputation in the industry.

He was mentored by greats like Ruth Krauss and Crockett Johnson. About Krauss, he said, “She was my school.” She encouraged him to change style every book so he wouldn’t become stale.

Ruth was way ahead of women’s lib. She wouldn’t let me get away with any myths about what little boys did and what little girls did.

When he experienced doubt, Nordstrom encouraged him: “You may not be Tolstoy, but Tolstoy wasn’t Sendak, either. You have a vast and beautiful genius.”

Eventually, he started writing his own books and in 1963, won a Caldecott Medal for Where the Wild Things Are.

*Self portraits courtesy of The Sendak Exhibit*

How many books did he publish over his entire career?

Over his 60+ year career, he published more than 150 books and sold more than 50 million copies in 40 languages. He also won many awards like the Caldecott, the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, the National Medal of Arts, seven Caldecott Honors, and a National Book Award.

Did he make any other type of creative work?

Later in his life, he designed costumes and sets for operas and ballets.

*Stage design for* Krása’s *Brundibar* *courtesy of the Sendak Exhibit*

This second career in 1978 when esteemed theater and opera director Frank Corsaro called Sendak “out of the blue” asking him to design the sets and costumes for Mozart’s The Magic Flute (one of Sendak’s favorite operas).

In 1988, he worked on Mozarts Idomeneo drawing from one of his greatest inspirations William Blake. Sendak said the sea monster on the show curtain was “stolen” directly from Blake’s Behemoth and Leviathan watercolor.

The other operas he worked on include but are not limited to Prokoﬁev’s The Love for Three Oranges, Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker, and Mozart’s The Good of Cairo.

*Sendak designed this Goose for the opera called The Goose of Cairo — the design was inspired by Elizabeth Taylor’s performance in Cleopatra.*

He almost didn’t work on Nutcracker until he spoke with the choreographers who “wanted a richer, darker version.” The Pacific Northwest Ballet staged his sets and costumes for 31 years before retiring it in 2014.

When Where the Wild Things was turned into an opera in 1980 and the performers were barely able to sing in the costumes he designed. So in the second production four years later, silent actors manned the costumes while the singers sang offstage.

He also wrote the lyrics and edited or enhanced the animations for the musical animated production of his book Really Rosie in collaboration with Carole King.

He was credited as a producer in the movie version of Where the Wild Things — in fact, he worked on character designs with Jim Henson Studios. The director Spike Jonze said about him, “He basically gave me three rules, ‘I want you to make it personal. I want you to make it dangerous. And I don’t want you to pander to children. And if you do those three things, then that’s all I care about…I completely support anything you do.”

Author Dave Eggers cowrote the screenplay and said, “This is one of the main things that we talked about for years with the moive, was that kids are animals. They are feral beasts. They need to be given space to be wild and crazy…and pretend to be sword fighters, and pretend to be pirates, and pretend to be anything.”

Sendak loved the movie.

What was his personal life like?

He was very private about his personal life, but he had a 50-year partnership with psychoanalyst Eugene David Glynn. They loved reading books, traveling, and listening to music together.

Sendak expressed that being a gay man in children’s books felt “dangerous” and it created a lot of anxiety for him:

“It was something you hid. I must have been 19 or 20 when it became obvious to me.”

In other interviews, he said:

“I didn’t want to be gay…It was yet another sign of isolation,” and “I was worried that that knowledge if it were to come out would ruin my career.”

He never told his parents he was gay, but came out publicly in 2008 at 80 years old.

He never really wanted kids (except maybe once) and felt grateful he could dedicate his life to his art instead.

He loved his pets as family members, and many of his books feature them. His first beloved dog Jenny’s death in 1967 inspired Higglety Pigglety Pop!. Later, Sendak and Glynn got a golden retriever named Io and a German Shepherd named Erda who inspired Some Swell Pup, a dog training manual.

Some of their other German Shepherds were traid by the monks of New Skete in Cambridge, NY who eventually named their dog training facility after him. About him they said, “Not only was he a lover of all things dog, he saw clearly their spiritual importance and how they can enrich out lives when they are cared for and loved.”

His last German Shepherd Herman (named after Melville) kept him company after Eugene passed in 2007.

How did he spend his retirement?

He never actually stopped working, especially because the only time he felt true happiness was making books, and he continued to find new inspirations until he passed away.

The last book he was working on was called No Nose about a man in search of his lost nose. A drawing from that book was the last sheet on his desk at the time of his death.

What were some of his last words?

Here are some of his beautiful words from one of his last interviews (I definitely recommend a listen here):

“Almost certainly I’ll go before you go so I won’t have to miss you.”
”I’m a happy old man but I will cry my way all the way to the grave.”
“There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die. But I’m ready. I’m ready. I’m ready.”

When did he pass away?

Maurice Sendak passed away in 2012 at the age of 83 after suffering a stroke.

His creative process

What did he prioritize in his creative work?

Sendak disliked “half-true” children’s books that offer “a gilded world unshadowed by the least suggestion of conflict or pain, a world manufactured by those who cannot—or don’t care to—remember the truth of their own childhood.” He argued that these books were more concerned with not frightening adults and had “no relation to the way real children live.”

“The common wish to protect children from their everyday fears and anxieties [is] a hopeless wish that denies the child’s endless battle with disturbing emotions…The book doesn’t say that life is constant anxiety. It simply says that life has anxiety in it.”

Writer and mythologist Joseph Campbell said about Wild Things: “It is only when a man tames his own demons that he becomes the king of himself, not the world.”

When describing what he prioritizes in his work, Sendak said:

“I think what I’ve offered was different but not because I drew better than anybody or wrote better than anybody but because I was more honest than anybody. And in the discussion of children and the lives of children and the fantasies of children and the language of children, I said anything I wanted to…I don’t believe in this demarkation like ‘you mustn’t tell them that’…If it’s true, you tell them.”

How did he stay inspired?

“It’s a constant fountain, a source of refreshment, to go to the masters. They have done so much that we can learn from.”

Sendak loved William Blake because he couldn’t fully understand him: “I guess it’s the way his profound belief in something sounds kind of idiotic but I believe him. I believe in his passion.”

He was delighted by Mozart.

“I am in conjunction with something I can't explain…I don't need to. I know that if there's a purpose for life, it was for me to hear Mozart.”

Mozart often inspired what Sendak called his “fantasy sketches” — in one, Sendak “emulates the feel of Mozart’s manuscript, transforming musical symbols into faces and figures.” The Sendak Exhibit continues, “Although Sendak could not read music, he admired the beauty of Mozart’s handwriting, seeing hsi scores as visual works of art.”

If God is someone that’s supposed to give you comfort, I think of him and I listen to him when I’m in trouble…Because there is a truth, a revelation, spirituality, humor, and earthiness.”

He carried Emily Dickinson everywhere: “She is so brave. She is so strong. She is such a passionate little woman. [After reading three poems], I feel better.”

He stole Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland from his cousin. “It’s a terrifying book; it’s a nightmare. That to me comes as close to the world of childhood as great books do. Carroll was allowing for nightmare, murderous impulses. I don’t know why he got away from it. He told the truth about childhood, about how unsafe it was.”

He disliked Peter Pan because of “the sentimental idea that anybody would want to remain a boy…this was a conceit that could only occur in the mind of a very sentimental writer that any child would want to remain in childhood. It’s not possible. The wish is to get out.”

His other inspirations included Schubert, Hugo Wolfe, Palmer, Proust, Eliot, Middlemarch, Randolph Caldecott, George Cruikshank, Ludwig Richter, Wilhelm Busch, A. B. Frost, Edward Windsor Kemble, Ernst Kreidolf, Hans Fischer, André François, Watteau, Goya, Winslow Homer, Mahler, Beethoven, Wolf, Wagner, Verdi, Walt Disney, James, Stendhal, D. H. Lawrence, and Melville.

He was an atheist, but he saw his muses as “wonderful gods who have gotten me through the narrow straits of life.”

He took inspiration from books, comics, plays, music, and family.

HIs studio was full of objects “to keep in the mood of whatever” he was working on. (Like a fragile brontosaurus his nephew built for him.)

He looked for the same quality in all of his inspirations: “authentic liveliness”

He loved learning from others his whole life — even in his last interviews, he shared what he was reading or listening to or his latest story ideas.

When interviewers asked him questions like, “What makes a good children’s book?” he always answered the same way. “Well how would I know?”

Did he have any creative rituals?

He developed a life-long practice starting in the 1950s that he called “fantasy sketches.” Basically, he would listen to a piece of classical music (usually Mozart, Beethoven, or Schubert) and try to draw a story before the song ended. He explored animation and let his brain go wild.

Music helped unravel my imaginary scenes; it pressed the button, turned the key, kept my pen moving across the paper.

Sendak pretty much always made teeny dummies, or mockups, of his books so he could arrange text and images to find the right layout.

What other creative fields inspired his work?

Animation — he loved making his illustrations dance like a flip book.

Music — his record player was always in use:

“Depending on what I’m doing at the moment, there is always a specific kind of music I want to listen to. All composers have different colors as all artists do. And I kind of pick up the right color from either Haydn or Mozart or Wagner while I’m working. And very often I will switch recordings endlessly until I get the right color and the right note and the right sound and then settle down happily into whatever I’m doing.”

What is the role of the illustrator according to Sendak?

“[Wagner] in some mysterious way, had made the atmosphere—the very night air—of Nuremberg into music. I could see the city and smell it. And that’s the kind of thing I want to convey in my illustrations. The pictures should be so organically akin to the text, so reflective of its atmosphere, that they look as if they could have been done in no other way. They should help create the special world of the story. When this kind of drawing works, I feel like a magician, because I’m creating the air for a writer.”

How did Sendak view children’s books?

He said a lot of contradicting things throughout this career that can lead to confusion sometimes. I’ll share what I’ve collected here and leave it to your interpretation.

He didn’t like the term “children’s books” and preferred “books that children like.”

“I don’t write for children. I don’t write for adults. I just write.”

He didn’t really believe in childhood at all. He felt kids were often dismissed.

A great comic portraying a conversation about that between Sendak and Art Spiegelman

A few more quotes:

“There is something about this country that is so opposed to understanding the complexity of children. It’s quite amazing.”
“I’ve always had a deep respect for children and how they solve complex problems by themselves. [And how do they?] Through shrewdness, fantasy, and just plain strength. They want to survive. They want to survive.”
“Grown-ups desperately need to feel safe, and then they project onto the kids. But what none of us seem to realize is how smart kids are. They don’t like what we write for them, what we dish up for them, because it’s vapid, so they’ll go for the hard words, they’ll go for the hard concepts, they’ll go for the stuff where they can learn something, not didactic things, but passionate things.”

And the most confusing quote of all:

“I don’t write for children. I write. And somebody says, that’s for children. I didn’t set out to make children happy or make life better for them or easier for them. [Do you like them?] I like them as few and far between as I do adults. Maybe a bit more because I really don’t like adults.”

But one more to maybe clarify:

“You cannot write for children. They’re much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.”

How did Sendak view his audience?

Sendak didn’t idealize childhood:

“Too many parents and too many writers of children’s books don’t respect the fact that kids know a great deal and suffer a great deal.”

He believed, “the magic of childhood is the strangeness of childhood.”

He remembered being “a creature without power, without pocket money, without escape routes of any kind [who] didn’t want to be a child.”

He always tried to “draw the way children feel” instead of focusing on what he called “the naturalistic beauty of a child.”

“All I have to go on is what I know—not only about my childhood then but about the child I was as he exists now. You see, I don’t believe, in a way, that the kid I was grew up into me. He still exists somewhere, in the most graphic, plastic, physical way…One of my worst fears is losing contact with him. I don’t want this to sound coy or schizophrenic, but at least once a day I feel I have to make contact.”
“The pleasures I get as an adult are heightened by the fact that I experience them as a child at the same time. Like, when autumn comes, as an adult I welcome the departure of the heat, and simultaneously, as a child would, I start anticipating the snow and the first day it will be possible to use a sled.”
“Why would any book be good for all children? I mean no grown up book is good for all people so we mustn’t assume that a book that won a Caldecott is appropriate for every child reading it.”

HIs first priority was to “reach and keep hold of the child in me” and second to reach his audience.

What were his interactions with kids like?

He hated signing books because he thought it was “social nonsense.”

He often unintentionally made kids cry because they didn’t understand who he was or why he was drawing all over their books. One time a kid yelled, “Don’t crap up my book!” Sendak called the kid courageous and said, “It was the bravest cry I’ve ever heard. I nearly wept.”

One kid wrote him: “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.”

“A little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children's letters - sometimes very hastily - but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, 'Dear Jim: I loved your card.' Then I got a letter back from his mother and she saiad: 'Jim loved your card so much he ate it.' That to me was one of the highest compliments I've ever received. He didn't care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”

What were his interactions with adults like?

The only point of this question is to share the interview he had with Stephen Colbert which is one of my favorite interviews of all time. The only place I’ve been able to find it is in small clips here.

Did he ever struggle with the creative process?

“I get a sour feeling about books in general and my own in particular. The next stage is annoyance at my dependence on this dual apperception, and I reject it. Then I become depressed. When excitement about what I’m working on returns, so does the child. We’re on happy terms again. Being in that kind of contact with my childhood is vital to me, but it doesn’t make me perfectly certain I know what I’m doing in my work.”

What were Sendak’s thoughts on book design?

He believed books needed to be designed and treated like a beautiful objects.

“Reading is a physical act….Every book that is manufactured should have textures and qualities and smells as though it were a toy. As though it were something precious. And then when you’re read to by a parent…you have the whole thing….parent, child, and book fusion. That’s something television or any other form cannot give a human being.”
“If one picks up a book and is dazzled by the beauty of the book and nothing else, one has failed….It should harmonize so that you cannot separate the book from the binding, the endpapers, the title page, the typeface on the title pace, the frontispiece. It should all become so blended, so uniform that the feeling is that there is positively no other way this possible could have been done.”

He described that as a child, he felt that “books were holy objects, to be caressed, rapturously sniffed, and devotedly provided for. I gave my life to them.”

What were Sendak’s thoughts on pacing and page turns?

“Why would a child turn the page? A child isn’t polite. I mean adults will conscientiously read a book they don’t like because they feel they should. Children don’t feel any such compulsion. If they hate the first two pages, its ‘whamo’ against the wall. They don’t care if its won 18 Caldecott awards…so you’ve got to catch them. You’ve got to catch them in a rhythmic pattern, a syncopation that makes them turn that page.”
“You got to catch them with your metronome right from the start so they syncopate with the book…Children hum and move when they’re reading a book and they’re turning pages and looking for pictures. The timing has to be intuitive to an incredible degree.”

How long did it take Sendak to finish a book?

He described writing as “tremendously difficult” and the incredible patience making books required; sometimes it took him 5-10 years to complete a book.

What motivated him to keep making books?

His “permanent dissatisfaction,” the need in him “to achieve something of incredible height for [his] sake,” and the fact it made him happy.

“[Making books] is the only true happiness I’ve ever ever ever endured in my life. It’s sublime. Its just going into another room and making pictures. It’s magic time. Where all your weaknesses of character and blemishes of personality and whatever else torments you fades away.”

“The art of illustrating is like any other art, the art of growing up into oneself.”

His books

I decided to organize these by publication date to better see the evolution of his voice and style over the span of his career.

Books he wrote and illustrated:

Kenny’s Window (Harper & Brothers, 1956)

The first book that Sendak wrote at age 28.

Inspired by his lonely childhood spent at the window

His grandmother would entertain him by pulling the window shade up and down when he was sick: “It was like a magic show.”

Very Far Away (Harper & Brothers, 1957)

Sendak had to make the images as layers of different colors that would be overlapped. He started with a line drawing, then added atmospheric layers in gray and brown watercolor to define texture and space. Then they were layered into one image.

The Sign on Rosie’s Door (Harper & Brothers, 1960)

He loved observing and sketching Brooklyn kids and wrote snippets of conversations he would hear. One charismatic girl named Rosie would entertain all the kids in the neighborhood and inspired a story.

We never officially met; once, however, when we passed in the street, she saluted me with a ‘Hi Johnson!’ Bewildering, but typical Rosie. She made me up on the spot.

He actually said all of his characters have a little of Rosie in them.

Pierre…could be Rosie playing Pierre!—and it was only a short step from Pierre to Max of Where the Wild Things Are. A mere change of sex cannot disguise the essential Rosieness of my heroes.

Nutshell Library, including Pierre, Chicken Soup with Rice, Alligators All Around, One Was Johnny (Harper & Row, 1962)

Pierre: Inspired by flip books — designed so that the expressions and movement of his body change as you flip through. Also inspired by dance and especially Charlie Chaplin

Alligators: he wanted to give kids an alphabet book that was more than recitation.

My alligators aren’t teachers…They do the kinds of things that all my children do.

Where the Wild Things Are (Harper & Row, 1963)

“How many people have a five year old child care for their fathers all through his life? That kid in the silly wool suit has made my life pleasurable. Not many people have children who are so financially dependable. Which has allowed me to invest in all kinds of experimental work. One should be happy to have one book like that.”

The book started on as a fantasy sketch in 1953.

Originally called Where the Wild Horses Are until Sendak realized he couldn’t draw horses

I wanted to get the effect of a series of animated drawings just dancing across the page.

Chose “Things” because he could draw anything and no one could critique him for not drawing it right

He said the title came from the Yddish phrase vilde chaya or “wild beast.”

It’s what almost every Jewish mother or father says to their offspring, ‘You’re acting like a vilde chaya! Stop it!’”

Felt his style solidified in this book

Some critics initially thought it was too scary, but millions disagreed.

Wild things based on his Jewish relatives who said things like, “We’ll eat you up— we love you so!”

When people asked him to do a second book, he found that “the most boring idea imaginable.”

“The fun of that book is a perilous tightrope of a little boy very vulnerable to these huge creatures and the absurdity of his having control of them by staring into their yellow eyes. It’s what every child would like, to have control over such things. Kids are not afraid of them because Max is not afraid of them.”

Later, when the book was expanded into a play, he had to give the wild things names. Some may have come from relatives, and one—Moishe—was his own nickname.

“I think Max is my truest creation. Like all kids, he believes in a world where a child can skip from fantasy to reality in the conviction that both exist.”

Higglety Pigglety Pop! or There Must Be More to Life (Harper & Row, 1967)

Sendak considered this his favorite book. Three of the illustrations were the only art by him that he hung in his house.

The main character was inspired by his beloved dog Jennie who died about a month before this book was published.

The theme of mortality was prompted by his own massive heart attack, his mom’s terminal illness, and the news that his dog Jennie was dying of cancer.

[The book became] my requiem for [Jennie]—an unsentimental, even comic requiem to a shrewd, stubborn, loyal, and lovable creature whose all consuming passion was food.

Samuel Palmer’s The Lonely Tower inspired the crosshatch look of this book.

He placed da Vinci’s Mona Lisa behind Jennie in one of the drawings to reference her original name Mona when he got her as a puppy.

In the Night Kitchen (Harper & Row, 1970)

The title and story inspired by baking company advertisements that read “We bake While you Sleep!”

It seemed to me the most sadistic thing in the world because all I wanted to do was stay up and watch.”

As a kid, he didn’t like how “everything good happen[ed] when children went to bed.”

Main character was named after Mickey Mouse — he started collecting vintage Mickey Mouse merchandise when making these books as they connected him with fond memories. He became one of America’s biggest collectors.

Heavily influenced by comics and American animator Windsor McCay (especially his use of panels and the comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland).

He and I serve the same master, our child selves. We both draw not on the literal memory of childhood but on the emotional memory of its stress and urgency. And neither of us forgot our childhood dreams.

Look of the chefs was inspired by slap-stick comedian Oliver Hardy

It was an homage to everything I loved: New York, immigrants, Jews, Laurel and Hardy, Mickey Mouse, King Kong, movies. I just jammed them into one cuckoo book.

Banned a lot for depicting a naked boy (yes, lots of lil’ baby penises in this book). Sendak was surprised over this:

To me it was just the most natural thing in the world that we all knew what we looked like. And were rather pleased if we are lucky until we are told otherwise.”

“I didn’t set out to cause a scandal. I set out to do a very particular work where he had to be naked in order confront the dream he was in. You don’t go into a dream wearing fruit of the loom underwear or pjs. You go tuto, yourself, your being. That’s why he was naked. It was idiocy what went on over that book for many years.

He claimed his dreams were never actual inspiration for his stories, but he liked to explore dreams as a structure in his books.

Really Rosie, starring the Nutshell Kids, music by Carole King (Harper & Row, 1975)

Some Swell Pup, or Are You Sure You Want a Dog?, story by Maurice Sendak and Matthew Margolis (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976)

Seven Little Monsters (Harper & Row,1977)

Outside Over There (Harper & Row, 1981)

One of Sendak’s favorites and one of the most difficult for him to make and the most personal as the main character is inspired by his sister.

Took more than 100 drafts

Inspired by a trip to Europe where he fell in love with the german romantics, especially Runge, and the Grimm story “The Goblins.”

To make it, he had to confront his childhood fear of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping which “brought on a nervous breakdown of monumental force. It slammed me ot the ground. I got that close to the fire. I got that close to the fire.”

Got some pushback for having a fierce girl protagonist but Sendak thought that was absurd

Used the print Dad’s Coming by Winslow Homer (one of Sendak’s favorite artists) as a model for the opening scene to capture the sense of longing.

Caldecott & Co. (Michael di Capua Books / Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988)

We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy (Michael di Capua Books/ HarperCollins, 1993)

Sendak combined Mother Goose with two obscure rhymes to explore a story about children living on the city streets. About this book, the Sendak Exhibit said, “Sendak created the book in 1993, amid a rise in homelessness and during the AIDS epidemic, which claimed the lives of many of his friends. Jack and Guy could be seen as a gay couple, and their rescue of the child resembles an adoption, two decades before same-sex marriage became legal.”

He later said the characters Jack and Guy were an homage to his brother Jack and his life parter Eugene Glynn.

Bumble-Ardy (Michael di Capua Books / HarperCollins, 2011)

He made this book as his partner was dying. “When I did Bumble-ardy, I was intensely aware of death, Eugene was dying in the house while he made it. I did Bumble-ardy to save myself — I didn’t want to die with him. I wanted to live in that way a human being does.”

His favorite line was “I’ll never turn 10” because, “It sums up my life. It sums up my work. What is mad and ludicrous and funny and odd is true.” To him it was about the fragility, the irrationality, and the comedy of life.

“Bumble-arty was the combination of the deepest pain and the wondrous feeling of coming into my own. and it a took a long time.”

My Brother’s Book (Michael di Capua Books / HarperCollins, 2013)

After his brother Jack died in 1995, Sendak wanted to create a book to celebrate their relationship:

I’ve been struggling for over five years to write a memorial to my brother that would not all be revelatory or autobiographical but would convey what he meant to me. And I did it.

Books he illustrated:

Atomics for the Millions by Maxwell Leigh Eidinoff (Harper & Brothers, 1947)

He got this job after filling in part-time for the famous comic strip Mutt and Jeff during school.

The first book I illustrated was…for my physics teacher…He wrote a book which, I believe it’s true to say, was the first book explaining the atomic bomb to a layman.”

The Wonderful Farm by Marcel Aymé (Harper & Row, 1951)

He used pen-and-ink crosshatching for this book, a technique that was popular in the 1800s for wood engravings and black and white printing.

It might have been seen as a dated practice when he used it, but it brought some comforting, old-world charm to readers, and it became one of Sendak’s favorite techniques.

Good Shabbos, Everybody by Robert Garvey (United Synagogue Commission on Jewish Education, 1951) "

Maggie Rose: Her Birthday Christmas by Ruth Sawyer (Harper & Brothers, 1952)

A Hole Is To Dig by Ruth Krauss (Harper & Brothers, 1952)

Inspired by Wilhelm Busch and animation

“It was like being part of a revolution. This was the first time in modern children’s-book history that a book had come directly from kids. The notion was so startling to some academics, in fact, that the book was included in a course at Columbia on the uses of language. And, you know, some of those definitions have become part of the language. Working on that book, I learned something else, too. When it seemed to me to be all done, Ruth Krauss pointed out that I was giving the kids who would read the book middle-class attitudes toward their roles. I had the boys doing what boys were expected to do and girls doing what they were expected to do. God forbid a boy should be jumping rope! Of course, that isn’t the way it is, and at the last minute I made some quick changes.”

Hurry Home, Candy by Meindert DeJong (Harper & Brothers, 1953)

The Giant Story by Beatrice Schenk de Regniers (Harper & Brothers, 1953)

A Very Special House by Ruth Krauss (Harper & Brothers, 1953)

Shadrach by Meindert DeJong (Harper & Brothers, 1953)

Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's Farm by Betty MacDonald (Harper & Brothers, 1954)

I’ll Be You and You Be Me by Ruth Krauss (Harper & Brothers, 1954)

Called this collab with Krauss “great fun because every page was an experiment, every page we changed our minds. And yet the book hangs together in a way that’s fascinating because it’s the two of us. And it’s almost like a love book.”

The Wheel on the School by Meindert DeJong (Harper & Brothers, 1954)

The Magic Pictures by Marcel Ayme (Harper & Brothers, 1954)

The Tin Fiddle by Edward Tripp (Oxford University Press, 1954)

Little Cow & the Turtle by Meindert DeJong (Harper & Brothers, 1955)

Charlotte and the White Horse by Ruth Krauss (Harper & Brothers, 1955)

Inspired by William Blake (one of Sendak’s favorites), Marc Chagall, and folkloric illustrations from Eastern Europe

Sendak called it “a very pretty book and very simple book.”

Happy Hannukah Everybody by Hyman And Alice ((United Synagogue Commission on Jewish Education, 1955)

Singing Family of the Cumberlands by Jean Ritchie (University Press of Kentucky, 1955)

I Want to Paint My Bathroom Blue by Ruth Krauss (Harper & Brothers, 1956)

The Happy Rain by Jack Sendak (Harper & Brothers, 1956)

The House of Sixty Fathers by Meindert DeJong (Harper & Brothers, 1956)

The Birthday Party by Ruth Krauss (Harper & Brothers, 1957)

You Can't Get There From Here by Ogden Nash (Little, Brown and Company, 1957)

Circus Girl by Jack Sendak (Harper & Brothers, 1957)

Little Bear by Else Holmelund Minarik (Harper & Brothers, 1957)

Sendak wanted the matriarch to be “an image of warmth and strength—nothing less than motherhood itself.”

Inspired by the European engravings of the 1800s for the Victorian-era setting of the Bear’s world.

Along Came a Dog by Meindert DeJong (Harper & Brothers, 1958)

No Fighting, No Biting by Else Holmelund Minarik (Harper & Brothers, 1958)

Somebody Else’s Nut Tree and Other Tales from Children by Ruth Krauss (Harper & Brothers, 1958)

What Do You Say, Dear? by Sesyle Joslin (Young Scott Books, 1958)

Seven Tales by H. C. Andersen translated by Eva Le Gallienne (Harper & Brothers, 1959)

Inspired by gothic artists

Father Bear Comes Home by Else Holmelund Minarik (Harper & Brothers, 1959)

The Moon Jumpers by Janice May Udry (Harper & Brothers, 1959)

You can spot the precursor to the Wild Rumpus in some of the illustrations.

Dwarf Long Nose by Wilhelm Hauff, translated by Doris Orgel (Random House, 1960)

Little Bear’s Friend by Else Holmelund Minarik (Harper & Brothers, 1960)

Open House for Butterflies by Ruth Krauss (Harper & Brothers, 1960)

Little Bear’s Visit by Else Holmelund Minarik (Harper & Brothers, 1961)

What Do You Do, Dear? by Sesyle Joslin (Young Scott Books, 1961)

The Tale of Gockel, Hinkel & Gackeliah by Clemens Brentano trans:Doris Orgel (Random House,1961)

Schoolmaster Whackwell’s Wonderful Sons by Clemens Brentano, retold by Doris Orgel (Random House, 1962)

Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present by Charlotte Zolotow (Harper & Row, 1962)

Inspired by painter Winslow Homer

The Big Green Book by Robert Graves (The Crowell-Collier Press, 1962)

The Singing Hill by Meindert DeJong (Harper & Row, 1962)

She Loves Me ... She Loves Me Not ... by Robert Keeshan (Harper & Row, 1963)

How Little Lori Visited Times Square by Amos Vogel (Harper & Row, 1963)

Nikolenka’s Childhood by Leo Tolstoy (Pantheon, 1963)

Sarah’s Room by Doris Orgel (Harper & Row, 1963)

The Griffin and the Minor Cannon by Frank R. Stockton (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963)

You can see hints of Wild Things in the monsters.

Pleasant Fieldmouse by Jan Wahl (Harper & Row, 1964)

The Bat-Poet by Randall Jarrell (Macmillan, 1964)

Inspired by Beatrix Potter’s watercolor renderings of bats

Her ability to hear ‘the whistling that some people cannot hear’ and to know something about the stray mice and bats prefigure the microcosm Beatrix Potter so painstakingly, so brilliantly, brought to life in her books.”

The Bee Man of Orn by Frank R. Stockton (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964)

Hector Protector and As I Went Over the Water: Two Nursery Rhymes traditional nursery rhymes (Harper & Row, 1965)

Even though Wild Things was super successful, he wasn’t happy with the way the color looked in print. So for his next book, Hector, he used a very labor intensive process of creating a printing layer for the black and white drawing and another for the painted color.

These were his first efforts to illustrate Mother Goos rhymes.

You have a nice little Mother Goose text that allows you to rearrange the characters in any way you like and make up…any story you want; it just has to spring from those words.

The Animal Family by Randall Jarrell (Pantheon, 1965)

Lullabies and Night Songs, edited by William Engvick, music by Alec Wilder (Harper & Row, 1965)

Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer, translated by the author and Elizabeth Shub (Harper & Row, 1966)

He used old photos of his Polish relatives (he never met them) to illustrate this book.

All those dead Jews in my family—those who died in Hitler’s holocaust, or after lives of hardship and deprivation, had always been very close and important to me.

The Golden Key by George MacDonald (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967)

A Kiss for Little Bear by Else Holmelund Minarik (Harper & Row, 1968)

One of his Wild Things monsters made an appearance in this book.

The Light Princess by George MacDonald (Farrar, Straus & Giroux,1969)

King Grisly-Beard, from the Brothers Grimm, translated by Edgar Taylor (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973)

This project prompted him to explore Romanticism — rather than the traditionally sweeter fairytale illustrations, he embraced the intense, uncontrollable, dramatic characteristics of Romanticism in his art. He had a personal collection of art from Samuel Palmer and Carl Wilhelm Kolbe.

The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from Grimm, selected by Lore Segal and Maurice Sendak, translated by Lore Segal with four tales translated by Randall Jarrell (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973)

Sendak traveled through Europe in 1971 to prepare to illustrate this book. He visited the place in Germany where the Grimms collected their stories.

Clearly the brothers Grimm…never bothered their heads about providing so-called healthy or suitable literature for children. How fortunate for us they were only interested in telling a good story!

Hanging in his studio, he had Portrait of a German Woman by Ludwig Emil Grimm (the younger brother of the Grimm brothers who was an artist) which inspired the picture for “The Devil with the Three Golden Hairs”

Fly By Night by Randall Jarrell (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976)

The owls were inspired by Goya’s nightmarish images.

He also included a drawing of his mom holding him as a baby in the panorama, a nod to his interpretation of the book as author Randall Jarrell’s “open declaration of his need for a mother.”

Nutcracker by E. T. A. Hoffman, translated by Ralph Manheim (Crown, 1984)

Sendak often had friends pose for his books. His long-time friend and assistant Lynn Caponera was a model for Clara in this book.

The Love for Three Oranges by Frank Corsaro (The Bodley Head, 1984)

In Grandpa’s House by Philip Sendak (Harper & Row, 1985)

Though he wasn’t religious, he felt super connected to his Jewish history and traditions. According to the Sendak Exhibit, “his father, Philip, thrilled his children with stories rooted in folklore and shtetl life (Jewish villages in Eastern Europe).

This was his father’s story.

The Cunning Little Vixen by Rudolf Tesnohlidek, translated by Tatiana Firkusny, Maritza Morgan, and Robert T. Jones (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1985)

*From the Sendak exhibit at Denver Art Museum*

This gave Sendak an opportunity to explore funny character studies and imaginative costumes.

Dear Mili by Wilhelm Grimm, translated by Ralph Manheim (Michael di Capua Books / Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1988)

Dear Mili was made with watercolor, pencil, and ink on paper. It is based on a fairytale discovered in a letter written by Wilhelm Grimm to a girl whose mother had died. A plaque from the Maurice Sendak Exhibit said, “Although the story is a Christian allegory about war and death, Sendak imbued the book with the experience of Jewish children during the Holocaust.” In one of the illustrations, he had the children of Auschwitz singing to one of his favorite muses: Mozart.

The crosshatched etchings of giant plants by Romantic German artist Carl Wilhelm Kolbe inspired Sendak’s work in this book.

Seven Tales by Hans Christian Anderson (HarperCollins, 1990)

I Saw Esau, edited by Iona and Peter Opie (Walker Books, 1992)

Mother Goose nursery rhymes were a huge inspiration for Sendak — he liked that now they were sort of stripped of their context and he could play with them like puzzles.

Pierre, or The Ambiguities by Herman Melville (HarperCollins, 1995)

This was a new edition of a controversial psychological novel featuring an incestuous love triangle. According to the Sendak Exhibit, “Melville’s willingness in his novels like Moby-Dick and Billy Budd to explore repressed and conflicting desires and his reverence for nature dovetailed with Sendak’s own highly expressive and emotional aesthetic.”

Sendak posed the photos for the collaborative project with photographer John Dugdale and was described like an “old-time film director [who] should have had a megaphone and a director’s chair and a crop, the way he was yelling.”

The Miami Giant by Arthur Yorinks (Michael di Capua Books / HarperCollins, 1995)

Frank and Joey Eat Lunch by Arthur Yorinks (HarperCollins, 1996)

Frank and Joey Go to Work by Arthur Yorinks (HarperCollins, 1996)

Herman Melville: A biography, Volume 1 Cover by Hershel Parker

Sendak found a kindred spirit in the biographer as both loved Melville deeply. About Melville, Sendak said:

He is the greatest and loneliest artist I know; he gives me courage very often just to go on…Reading Moby-Dick is like getting drunk.”

What Can You Do with a Shoe? by Beatrice Schenk de Regniers( McElderry, 1955, re-colored 1997)

Cover for Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstom (1997)

The great editor Ursula Nordstrom was a huge mentor to him.

She treated me like a hothouse flower, watered me for ten years, and hand-picked the works that were to become my permanent backlist and bread-and-butter support.”

He crafted this cover for her, and some of the letters included were written to him.

Penthesilea by Heinrich von Kleist, translated by Joel Agee (Michael di Capua Books / HarperCollins, 1998)

Swine Lake by James Marshall (Michael di Capua Books / HarperCollins, 1999)

Bumble Ardy by Maurice Sendak, (HarperCollins, 2000)

Brundibar by Tony Kushner (Michael di Capua Books / Hyperion Books for Children, 2003)

Based on a play that was written for Jewish children in an orphan asylum during WWII. Before they could perform the play, they were taken to concentration camps. Hitler used this to his advantage by having the children perform the play to prove to diplomats how well everyone was being treated. After the performance, the children were killed. Sadly the strategy worked.

It was a struggle for Sendak and author Tony Kushner to find the right tone. Sendak said:

I don’t want to scare children to death. I really don’t want to, but I do want to tell them the truth. In Brundibar, all the signs of that are there and yet the composition is playful. The colors are bright. It somehow dilutes the expressions on their faces. These are doomed children.”

Sendak said he’d been carrying this weight around since childhood and creating the book was a part of releasing it.

Inspired by Grimm fairytales, specifically Hansel and Gretel

Bears by Ruth Krauss (Michael di Capua Books / HarperCollins, 2005)

Mommy? scenario by Arthur Yorinks, paper engineering by Matthew Reinhart (Michael di Capua Books / Scholastic, 2006)

Revisited the monsters of his childhood like Frankenstein’s Monster, the Werewolf of London, and The Mummy.

This is Sendak’s only pop-up book

Presto and Zesto in Limboland by Arthur Yorinks and Maurice Sendak (HarperCollins, 2018)

Seven Little Stories on Big Subjects by Gladys Baker Bond, illustrated by Maurice Sendak (1955)

Bibliography

Books

Wild Things Are Happening: The Art of Maurice Sendak by Maurice Sendak
There’s A Mystery There: The Primal Vision of Maurice Sendak by Jonathan Cott
The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present by Tony Kushner
Maurice Sendak: A Celebration of the Artist and his Work