Maurice Sendak, Children’s Author Who Upended Tradition, Dies at 83

The cause was complications from a recent stroke, said Michael di Capua, his longtime editor.

Roundly praised, intermittently censored and occasionally eaten, Mr.
Sendak’s books were essential ingredients of childhood for the
generation born after 1960 or thereabouts, and in turn for their
children. He was known in particular for more than a dozen picture books
he wrote and illustrated himself, most famously “Where the Wild Things
Are,” which was simultaneously genre-breaking and career-making when it
was published by Harper & Row in 1963.

Among the other titles he wrote and illustrated, all from Harper &
Row, are “In the Night Kitchen” (1970) and “Outside Over There” (1981),
which together with “Where the Wild Things Are” form a trilogy; “The
Sign on Rosie’s Door” (1960); “Higglety Pigglety Pop!” (1967); and “The
Nutshell Library” (1962), a boxed set of four tiny volumes comprising
“Alligators All Around,” “Chicken Soup With Rice,” “One Was Johnny” and
“Pierre.”

In September, a new picture book by Mr. Sendak, “Bumble-Ardy”
— the first in 30 years for which he produced both text and
illustrations — was issued by HarperCollins Publishers. The book, which
spent five weeks on the New York Times children’s best-seller list,
tells the not-altogether-lighthearted story of an orphaned pig (his
parents are eaten) who gives himself a riotous birthday party.

A posthumous picture book, “My Brother’s Book” — a poem written and
illustrated by Mr. Sendak and inspired by his love for his late brother,
Jack — is scheduled to be published next February.

Mr. Sendak’s work was the subject of critical studies and major
exhibitions; in the second half of his career, he was also renowned as a
designer of theatrical sets. His art graced the writing of other
eminent authors for children and adults, including Hans Christian
Andersen, Leo Tolstoy, Herman Melville, William Blake and Isaac Bashevis
Singer.

In book after book, Mr. Sendak upended the staid, centuries-old
tradition of American children’s literature, in which young heroes and
heroines were typically well scrubbed and even better behaved; nothing
really bad ever happened for very long; and everything was tied up at
the end in a neat, moralistic bow.

Mr. Sendak’s characters, by contrast, are headstrong, bossy, even
obnoxious. (In “Pierre,” “I don’t care!” is the response of the small
eponymous hero to absolutely everything.) His pictures are often
unsettling. His plots are fraught with rupture: children are kidnapped,
parents disappear, a dog lights out from her comfortable home.

A largely self-taught illustrator, Mr. Sendak was at his finest a shtetl
Blake, portraying a luminous world, at once lovely and dreadful,
suspended between wakefulness and dreaming. In so doing, he was able to
convey both the propulsive abandon and the pervasive melancholy of
children’s interior lives.

His visual style could range from intricately crosshatched scenes that
recalled 19th-century prints to airy watercolors reminiscent of Chagall
to bold, bulbous figures inspired by the comic books he loved all his
life, with outsize feet that the page could scarcely contain. He never
did learn to draw feet, he often said.

In 1964, the American Library Association awarded Mr. Sendak the
Caldecott Medal, considered the Pulitzer Prize of children’s book
illustration, for “Where the Wild Things Are.” In simple, incantatory
language, the book told the story of Max, a naughty boy who rages at his
mother and is sent to his room without supper. A pocket Odysseus, Max
promptly sets sail:

And he sailed off through night and day

and in and out of weeks

and almost over a year

to where the wild things are.

There, Max leads the creatures in a frenzied rumpus before sailing home, anger spent, to find his supper waiting.