We lost the great Maurice Sendak, creator of Where the Wild Things Are, on May 8, 2012 – these are his little-known and lovely vintage Velveteen Rabbit illustrations circa 1960.
Maurice Sendak
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In an essay about Maurice Sendak’s bittersweet posthumous farewell to the world, NYT’s Stephen Greenblatt considers the similarities between Sendak and Shakespeare.
My Brother’s Work – fifty years after Where the Wild Things Are and a year after his death, Maurice Sendak’s tender and bittersweet farewell to the world, wrapped in a love letter to the departed.
He and I were friends for 20 years, and I miss him terribly. His books will last as long as there are people on the planet, but he’s gone, and he’s taken with him the irreplaceable pleasure – the unique amalgamation of delightful nuttiness, naked, unapologetic need, wild associations and prodigious, profligate spontaneous invention – that could be had in his company.
Playwright Tony Kushner remembers the inimitable Maurice Sendak, one of the most influential children’s storytellers of all time.
This scene from the 1914 film Land of the Headhunters by Edward S. Curtis may have inspired Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. Sendak’s unreleased early sketches certainly bear a resemblance.
An entry into the Blown Covers weekly cover contest, themed “The Gays,” by writer and illustrator Ella German. The cover addresses the recent historic moment for marriage equality, also referencing Maurice Sendak, who had passed away the previous week. Though far from a gay rights activist, Sendak lived as an openly gay man with his partner of half a century. The two never had the opportunity to marry.
Yes, great. If Maurice Sendak had drawn The Avengers, a loving homage by designer Hannah Friedrichs.
What is unique about Sendak stories, though, isn’t that kids are both difficult and charming. You can get that from Amelia Bedelia or Beatrix Potter or Madeline. It is that they invent and then survive their own horror stories. In Where the Wild Things Are, the misbehaving Max is sent to his room — which, however much it might seem like punishment, is also the predecessor to a great adventure. The implicit moral, and certainly the fact of the matter, is that our rooms are where we all must go, alone, to nurture a sense of imagination and identity and courage. Sure, Sendak’s kids are sometimes slighted or ignored by parents, but the most terrifying situations they survive are the ones they create for themselves. Well, welcome to life.
Kathryn Schulz remembers Maurice Sendak for New York Magazine – by far the most exquisite obit for the King of the Wild Things.
Maurice Sendak’s preliminary sketches for Where The Wild Things Are. Also see his unreleased drawings.
I don’t write for children. I write — and somebody says, ‘That’s for children!’
Grim Colberty Tales – Maurice Sendak, wryly witty as ever, in his final interview, with none other than Stephen Colbert.
Maurice is a child of the Great Depression and of Jewish Depression, if I may generalise. Jewish Depression is that inherited awareness of the arduousness of knowing God, the arduousness of knowing anything, an acute awareness of the struggle to know, the struggle against not knowing; and it is that enduring sense of displacement, yearning for and not securely possessing a home. Maurice’s is a Yiddische kopf, a large, brooding, circumspect and contemplative mind, darkened by both fatalism and faith.
Playwright Tony Kushner on beloved children’s author Maurice Sendak, who passed away this week at the age of 83.
Also see Sendak’s final interview, with none other than Colbert, and his unreleased drawings.
COLBERT: What’s the best thing a parent can do for a child?
SENDAK: Love him, or her.
COLBERT: What does that mean?
SENDAK: Take them for what they are.
Uncensored outtakes from the instant classic Colbert/Sendak conversation, Maurice Sendak’s final TV appearance and last formal interview.
Maurice Sendak teaches Stephen Colbert how to draw a pole. Sendak’s drawing (left), true to his signature wit, depicts a Polish woman holding a pole.
