The Most Important Children’s Book Artist of the 20th Century—Maurice Sendak & “Where The Wild Things Are”

00:00:10
Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. “Genius,” wrote poet Charles Baudelaire, “is only childhood recalled at will.” Few people have given more credence to this notion than Maurice Sendak, who was, in the words of The New York Times, “widely considered to be the most important children’s book artist of the twentieth century.” Here’s Greg Hengler with the story of children’s book author and illustrator Maurice Sendak.

00:00:47
Speaker 2: Philosopher Gaston Bachelard once remarked that each childhood is a nightlight in the bedroom of memories. In Maurice Sendak’s case, it was the catalyst for more than one hundred illustrated children’s books that have sold more than thirty million copies in the United States alone. Some titles include The Little Bear Books, Pierre, Chicken Soup with Rice, Where the Wild Things Are, and In the Night Kitchen. Maurice Sendak was the third and youngest child born into a Jewish family on June 10th, 1928, in Brooklyn, New York.

00:01:23
Speaker 3: My father would talk about, “Watch, she be get born.” You said, “You were the happiest baby I ever. The other kids didn’t. You came out almost laughing.”

00:01:35
Speaker 4: And then he wrote me once and said, “I’ll never forget those early days when I would come in in the dark room and the crip and you just be laughing all by yourself, like a little bell, like a little bell ringing.” Oh, wow, wow! What a starter had! What a good beginning! What a hopeful sign, that one.

00:01:56
Speaker 3: What did they do, break the belle?

00:02:00
Speaker 2: His sister Natalie was nine and his brother Jack was five when he was born. Until he was about six, Maurice was a very sick child and spent most of his time in his room watching the world through his window. “The window became my movie camera, my television set,” he said. He would illustrate what he saw through the window, and his brother Jack would write the stories. Both of Maurice’s parents were Polish immigrants and had many relatives still living in Poland during the rise of Hitler and his Nazi Party. They managed to rescue a few to the United States, but in 1941, on the morning of his Bar Mitzvah, which is a special ceremony for Jewish boys when they turned thirteen, Maurice learned every one of his relatives back in Poland had been killed by the Nazis. In the days after the war ended, Maurice found himself a job in Manhattan as an artist with a company that created displays for storefronts. He was so good that he quickly earned himself a promotion, but his new coworker’s dissatisfaction with their jobs caused Maurice to quit, and he moved back in with his family in Brooklyn, picking up where he left off, spending his time staring out the window sketching. He became particularly interested in a little girl named Rosie. With his window open, he could hear her talking to other children. She would make up games and stories and bully them into playing along. Once he heard her gleefully describing her own grandmother’s death in great detail until the grandmother herself appeared on the steps. Another time, she described a fight between her parents as if she were a radio announcer. She was always the center of attention, but, as Maurice said, “save the other children from their worst enemy, boredom.” Later, Rosie would become his favorite character, the heroine of his 1960 book This Sign On Rosie’s Door.

00:04:09
Speaker 4: I didn’t have a lot of friends. I mostly observed children. I’d said at my window, and I draw them even when I was a child, and I would tell their stories. As their stories floated up to the window, I would write what their stories were. Today, Rosie decided to wear her long red dress. I filled gallons of sketchbooks with Rosie stories and other kids’ stories, and I kept the journal a very bad luck. Everybody who saw my work, he only used to say word like, “It’s European.” We all look at America and children’s books and say, “So you see that cute upturned noses and little puff of blonde hair in the front?”

00:04:46
Speaker 5: And I was thinking, I never knew a—

00:04:48
Speaker 4: Kid it looked like that. Never. They all had swashed heads and thumby, lumpy bodies.

00:04:55
Speaker 2: That summer in 1948, Maurice’s brother Jack was also out of work and living at home together. The brothers came up with an idea to make money. They created boxes with tiny wooden figures that moved and acted out scenes from fairy tales. Here’s Maurice in 1966.

00:05:15
Speaker 6: Speaking of toys…

00:05:16
Speaker 7: I have some here.

00:05:19
Speaker 6: Which were made by my brother and myself in 1948. My brother is a mechanical genius and put them together. And these are little fairy tales which I’m sure you’re all very well acquainted with. This little Red Riding Hood, it has a lever which, when pulled out, causes Little Red Riding Hood to collapse in mortal terror, the wolf to rare his hideous head above the blanket, and when pushed back again, the world is back to normalcy. She’s now standing expectantly, all ready to go through the same routine the rest of eternity. We spent the whole summer, summer of 1948, making these toys, until my father was a pall that having three grown children spending the summer making toys in the house, so we were all dumped out of the house to earn a living.

00:06:08
Speaker 2: They took them to the most famous toy store in the world, FAO Schwarz in Manhattan. The buyer there loved their toys, but they were much too complicated to be mass produced and sold. Still, the buyer was so impressed that he offered Maurice a job creating window displays.

00:06:28
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to our own Greg Hangler tell the story of the most important children’s book artists of the twentieth century, or at least one of them. Maurice Sendak, certainly my favorite, and what a story that we’re hearing! Indeed, here he is, having sort of weaseled his way in through hustle and grit to being a decorator of store displays and windows. And in comes Ursula Orstrom from Harper Brothers, and of course Sendak’s ready. His illustrations are everywhere. And as he put it, “She made me who I am.” “I never went to art school and drew in a clumsy fashion, but she could see beneath that.” And by the way, that’s the story of Irving Berlin and so many of American artists. They weren’t highly trained. They came from the ground up. They came from the people up, like the country ourself, governed by us, the democratization of our art. This is one of these kinds of stories we cherish here on the show. And then he gets that shot: the first picture book that he fully illustrates and writes, and it’s full-color. But he has to have it be about something that he is thoroughly engaged with, as any good piece of art. And out came Where the Wild Things Are, and it started with Where the Wild Horses Are. But he couldn’t draw horses, thank goodness for all of us. But he could make up “things” and base those characters that we all love, or so many of us love, on his aunts and uncles and just sort of those hants and uncles into these monsters. Essentially. The critics, well, many of them were worried about the fact that it would frighten the kids. And it may have frightened some, not this kid. When I was a kid, this was my favorite book. I could be put to sleep to this still tonight by this book. When we continue, more of the story of Maurice Sendak here on Our American Stories. And we continue with Our American Stories and the story of Maurice Sendak. Let’s pick up where we last left off.

00:18:17
Speaker 2: Where the Wild Things Are helped change picture books forever. Before it came out, most children’s books only talked about nice feelings. After Where the Wild Things Are was released, people started to realize that it was good for a picture book to deal with other feelings like anger and fear. One little boy sent him a fan letter, and Maurice sent back an original drawing of a wild thing. But soon after, Maurice got a letter from the boy’s mother. “Jim loved your card so much he ate it,” the mother wrote. Maurice always said this was one of the best compliments he ever received.

00:19:01
Speaker 5: Then after a while, things. The next picture book, In the Night Kitchen, was 1970. The reason it took the form of a comic book was because I loved comic books. When I was a child, I didn’t have children’s books. I didn’t even know there were children’s books until I went to school, and we had to sit in the auditorium and hear Pinocchio read to us and Winnie the Pooh read to us. I hated them because I didn’t like my teachers, and I didn’t like being told stories where I had to have my hands clasped in my lap. Anyway, In the Night Kitchen was going to be a comic book, and that was that.

00:19:33
Speaker 2: In the Night Kitchen was based on Maurice’s memory as an eleven-year-old with his older sister Natalie. Here’s Maurice in 2000 and…

00:19:41
Speaker 4: Eight. 1939 World’s Fair. I was screaming to be taken. I had to go with an older person, and she had a new boyfriend, and somehow she talked to me to accept the idea that they would take me along. The Seventh Heaven! I just loved it. And we stopped at these Sunshine Bakers, little fat bakers, and they’re all steading in tears on white platforms. That whole place was so like a 1930s movie, white, white, Caroleo barred white, and all the little bidgets came out. A little tubby guy has a little black mustaches, and the aroma of fresh baking came out of the building, probably pumping it out into the air. And I just stood there breathing a swelling bread, and I love the spell of baking bread. And I was just waving back.

00:20:40
Speaker 2: Here’s Maurice making one more point on In the Night Kitchen.

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Speaker 5: And it was going to be simple. It was going to look by Windsor McKay a little bit. It was going to look like Mickey Mouse a little bit. It was going to look like everybody I loved. And it was going to tell a story that obsessed me, which is a story about food; which is a story about why those little creatures—