Maurice Sendak, the legendary children's book author and illustrator who perfected the art of describing the anxiety and darkness that often accompany childhood, died Tuesday morning in Danbury, Conn.
Sendak's publisher says the 83-year-old Ridgefield writer died of complications from a recent stroke.
Since the early 1960s, Sendak classics like "Where the Wild Things Are" have stirred the imaginations of young children, whose eyes go wide as the monsters in that distant place "roar their terrible roars and gnash their terrible teeth."
Memories like that compelled me to seek out Sendak for one of the first interviews I ever conducted as a journalist.
That was 20 years ago. And at the time, the then 62-year-old author had written and illustrated 20 children's books of his own and illustrated another 60. He'd also recently been awarded the first Empire State Award for Excellence in Literature for Young People, an award presented by the Youth Services section of the New York Library Association.
"I've never claimed to know what children like," Sendak said as we sat down to talk in his Connecticut home. "I seem to know, but that's through instinct more than anything else."
As both our conversation and his books attest, it was an instinct expressed more through art than through prose. "Where The Wild Things Are," arguably his most famous book, originally published in 1964, consists of only 385 words. The pictures, on the other hand, reveal volumes about the artist's sensitivity to the idyllic and not-so-idyllic in childhood.
Though Sendak said he preferred illustrating his own words, he explained what brought him to work on other author's books.
"I'm a slow writer, so at least in the old days, in between my books - waiting for them to cook, if you will, I illustrated other's books just to keep working," he said.
"These days," Sendak continued, "I'm a stage designer, for operas and ballets, so I don't do it as much. [Now] when one of my books gestates, I'll just stop whatever else I'm doing and do it."
Either way, his process is pretty much the same, the illustrator said.
"You listen to what the book is - hopefully you don't have a style to begin with, because that's lethal - you respond, as an artist, according to what the book's needs are," Sendak explained.
"It really is instinctual," he said. "I don't pre-decide anything. It's a question of tuning in, catching the sounds of the book, so that I'm translating graphically. That's difficult, but that's the fun of it."
What winds up rendered on paper, usually in tempera paint, pencil, black ink or a mixture of all three, can best be described as the extraordinary distilled from the ordinary. In fact many of the imaginative leaps in Sendak's books stem from his own experiences and thoughts as a child growing up in the Brooklyn, N.Y., of the 1930s and '40s.
"I wasn't your normal outdoorsy kid," Sendak explained. "I spent my time reading, was not very athletic, and my father was very upset. He thought I should be out playing ball with the other kids."