Maurice Sendak Has Died

By Jason Boog 

Maurice Sendak has passed away, leaving behind a lifetime of beloved children’s books, including Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen and Outside Over There.

This GalleyCat editor will never forget reading Where the Wild Things Are to his daughter for the first time. Months before she could speak, she could growl like the dreamy monsters lurking in that book. Sendak’s poem and picture book about his late brother, My Brother’s Book, will be published in February.

Here’s more from the New York Times: “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.”

What was your favorite Maurice Sendak book?

The New Yorker has opened up a classic two-page comic that dramatized an interview between Sendak and Art Spiegelman.

HarperCollins posted reactions and tributes from other authors.

The author made an appearance on The Colbert Report, talking about his work.

 

Brooklyn borough president Marty Markowitz offered this tribute: “For the second time in five days, Brooklyn has lost one of great creative minds—Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys last Friday and, earlier today, Brooklyn-born children’s writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak. Sendak grew up in Bensonhurst and graduated Lafayette High School before going on to create wildly popular works—often dark and with an edge—like Where the Wild Things Are, which won him the prestigious Caldecott Medal. Even before his passing, the Brooklyn Book Festival had planned to honor Mr. Sendak with a special bookmark given to attendees at this year’s festival on September 23, a fitting tribute from Brooklyn—the Creative Capital of New York City and home to more writers per square inch than anywhere—to one of its native sons. On behalf of literary lovers throughout Brooklyn and beyond, I extend our thoughts and prayers to Maurice Sendak’s family, friends and colleagues.”

(Photo via John Dugdale)