Author/Illustrator Maurice Sendak Career Biography

Who would have thought that Maurice Sendak would become one of the most influential, and controversial, creators of childrens books in the twentieth century? Maurice Sendak was born on June 10, 1928, in Brooklyn, New York and died on May 8, 2012. He was the youngest of three children, each born five years apart. His Jewish family had immigrated to the United States from Poland before World War I and were to lose many of their relatives to the Holocaust during World War II. His father was a wonderful storyteller, and Maurice grew up enjoying his fathers imaginative tales and gaining a lifelong appreciation for books. Sendaks early years were influenced by his sickliness, his hatred of school, and the war. From an early age, he knew he wanted to be an illustrator. While still attending high school, he became an illustrator for All-American Comics. Sendak subsequently worked as a window dresser for F.A.O. Schwartz, a well-known toy store in New York City. How did he then get involved in illustrating and writing and illustrating childrens books? Maurice Sendak, Author, and Illustrator of Childrens Books Sendak began to illustrate childrens books after meeting Ursula Nordstrom, a childrens book editor at Harper and Brothers. The first was The Wonderful Farm by Marcel Ayme, which was published in 1951 when Sendak was 23 years old. By the time he was 34, Sendak had written and illustrated seven books and illustrated 43 others. A Caldecott Medal and Controversy With the publication of Where the Wild Things Are in 1963 for which Sendak won the 1964 Caldecott Medal, Maurice Sendaks work earned both acclaim and controversy. Sendak addressed some of the complaints about the scary aspects of his book in his Caldecott Medal acceptance speech, saying: â€Å"Certainly, we want to protect our children from new and painful experiences that are beyond their emotional comprehension and that intensify anxiety; and to a point we can prevent premature exposure to such experiences. That is obvious. But what is just as obvious-and what is too often overlooked is the fact that from their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions, that fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, that they continually cope with frustration as best they can. And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things. As he went on to create other popular books and characters, there seemed to be two schools of thought. Some people felt that his stories were too dark and disturbing for children. The majority view was that Sendak, through his work, had pioneered a completely new way of writing and illustrating for, and about, children. Both Sendaks stories and some of his illustrations were subject to controversy. For example, the nude little boy in Sendaks picture book In the Night Kitchen was one of the reasons the book was 21st among the 100 most frequently challenged books of the 1990s and 24th among the 100 most frequently challenged books of the 2000s. Maurice Sendak’s Impact In his book, Angels and Wild Things: The Archetypal Poetics of Maurice Sendak, John Cech, Professor of English at the University of Florida and a past president of the Childrens Literature Association, wrote: Indeed, without Sendak, an enormous void would exist in contemporary American (and, for that matter, international) childrens books. One can only try to imagine what the landscape of childrens literature would be like without Sendaks fantasies and the characters and places visited in them. These fantasies essentially broke through the relatively unperturbed surfaces of postwar American childrens literature, sending his children - Rosie, Max, Mickey, Jennie, Ida - on journeys into regions of the psyche that childrens books had not dared visit before. That these journeys have been embraced by countless other childrens authors and their audiences since Sendaks seminal works is apparent when you look at the childrens books presently being published. Maurice Sendak Honored Starting with the first book he illustrated (The Wonderful Farm by Marcel Ayme) in 1951, Maurice Sendak illustrated or wrote and illustrated more than 90 books. The list of awards presented to him is too long to include in full. Sendak received the 1964 Randolph Caldecott Medal for Where the Wild Things Are and the Hans Christian Andersen International Medal in 1970 for his body of childrens books. He was the recipient of the American Book Award in 1982 for Outside Over There. In 1983, Maurice Sendak received the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for his contributions to childrens literature. In 1996, Sendak was honored by the President of the United States with the National Medal of Arts. In 2003, Maurice Sendak and Austrian author Christine Noestlinger shared the first Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award for Literature. Sources Cech, John. Angels and Wild Things: The Archetypal Poetics of Maurice Sendak. Pennsylvania State Univ Press, 1996Lanes, Selma G. The Art of Maurice Sendak. Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1980Sendak, Maurice. Caldecott Co.: Notes on Books Pictures. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988.