‘Something Wonderful Out of Almost Nothing’

[ashling]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jul/12/something-wonderful-out-almost-nothing/


Copyright ©1993 by Maurice Sendak
One of Maurice Sendak’s original drawings for We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy, 1992; from the exhibition ‘Maurice Sendak: A Legacy,’ which will be on view at the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia, June 10, 2012–May 26, 2013

Only a few people have been both great writers and great illustrators of children’s books. In the nineteenth century there was Edward Lear, and in the twentieth Dr. Seuss and—perhaps the most gifted of them all—Maurice Sendak, who died in May at the age of eighty-three.

Sendak’s best-known work, Where the Wild Things Are (1963), shocked some adult readers at first; later it was recognized as a brilliant breakthrough. It gave graphic expression to what every parent knows—that kids are sometimes angry and even violent; and it proposed that these impulses could be explored and enjoyed rather than repressed and denied. Within a few years Where the Wild Things Are was a recognized classic. It wasn’t a fluke: the same originality and psychological insight was already evident in Sendak’s earlier work, most notably perhaps in Pierre: A Cautionary Tale, the best of the four tiny books (each less than 3 by 4 inches) in his Nutshell Library (1962)