Background and career
Maurice Bernard Sendak (; June 10, 1928 – May 8, 2012) was an American author and illustrator of children's books. Born to Polish-Jewish parents, his childhood was impacted by the death of many of his family members during the Holocaust. Sendak illustrated his own books as well as those by other authors, such as the Little Bear series by Else Holmelund Minarik. He achieved acclaim with Where the Wild Things Are (1963), the first of a trilogy followed by In the Night Kitchen (1970) and Outside Over There (1981). He also designed sets for operas, notably Mozart's The Magic Flute. In 1987, Sendak was the subject of an American Masters documentary, "Mon Cher Papa". In 1996, he received the National Medal of Arts. Per Margalit Fox, Sendak, "the most important children's book artist of the 20th century", "wrenched the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery and plunged it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche." His career was chronicled in Lance Bangs's Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak (2009).
Sendak was born on June 10, 1928, in Brooklyn, New York, to Polish-Jewish immigrants Sadie (née Schindler) and Philip Sendak, a dressmaker. Maurice said that his childhood was a "terrible situation" due to the death of members of his extended family during the Holocaust which introduced him at a young age to the concept of mortality. His love of books began when, as a child, he developed health issues and was confined to his bed. He was "enthralled by Mickey Mouse (who was created the year of his birth), by American comics, and by the bright lights of Manhattan." When he was 12 years old, he decided to become an illustrator after watching Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940). Maurice was the youngest of three siblings, born five years after Jack Sendak and nine years after Natalie Sendak. Jack also became an author of children's books, two of which were illustrated by Maurice in the 1950s. In 2011, Maurice was working on a book about noses, and he attributed his love of the olfactory organ to his brother Jack, who, in Sendak's opinion, had a great nose. At the New York Art Students League, he took a class from John Groth, who taught him "a sense of the enormous potential for motion, for aliveness in illustration […] He himself […] showed how much fun creating in it could be."
Maurice Sendak began his professional career in 1947 with illustrations for a popular science book, Atomics For the Millions. One of Sendak's first professional commissions, when he was 20 years old, was creating window displays for the toy store FAO Schwarz. The store's children's book buyer introduced him to Ursula Nordstrom, children's book editor at Harper & Row, who would go on to edit E. B. White's Charlotte's Web (1952) and Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy (1964). This led to his first illustrations for a children's book, for Marcel Aymé's The Wonderful Farm (1951). His work appears in eight books by Ruth Krauss, including A Hole Is to Dig (1952), which brought wide attention to his artwork. He illustrated the first five books in Else Holmelund Minarik's Little Bear series. The Maurice Sendak Foundation cites Krauss, Nordstrom and Crockett Johnson as mentors to Sendak. He made his solo debut with Kenny's Window (1956). He published the Nutshell Library (1962), consisting of Alligators All Around, One Was Johnny, Pierre and Chicken Soup With Rice. Sendak said of Nordstrom: "She treated me like a hothouse flower, watered me for ten years, and hand-picked the works that were to become my permanent backlist and bread-and-butter support." Sendak gained international acclaim after writing and illustrating Where the Wild Things Are (1963), edited by Nordstrom. It features Max, a boy who "rages against his mother for being sent to bed without any supper". The book's depictions of fanged monsters concerned some parents when it was first published, as his characters were somewhat grotesque in appearance. Sendak explained that the title came from the Yiddish phrase vilde chaya, or "wild beast": "It's what almost every Jewish mother or father says to their offspring, 'You're acting like a vilde chaya! Stop it!'" It won the Caldecott Medal, considered the highest honor for picture books in the United states. Humphrey Carpenter and Mari Prichard write that "it is generally considered unequaled in its exploration of a child's fantasy world and its relation to real life." It was adapted into an opera by Oliver Knussen and a film by Spike Jonze. Sendak later recounted the reaction of a fan:
A little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children's letters–sometimes very hastily–but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, "Dear Jim: I loved your card." Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said: "Jim loved your card so much he ate it." That to me was one of the highest compliments I've ever received. He didn't care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it. Sendak illustrated The Bat Poet (1964), a children's book by Randall Jarrell. When Sendak saw a manuscript of Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories, the first children's book by Isaac Bashevis Singer, on the desk of an editor at Harper & Row, he offered to illustrate it. It was first published in 1966 and received a Newbery Honor. Sendak was enthusiastic about the collaboration. He once wryly remarked that his parents were "finally" impressed by their youngest child when he collaborated with Singer. Higglety Pigglety Pop! or There Must Be More To Life (1967), inspired by Sendak's dog, Jennie, was his favorite of his books. He called it "my requiem for [Jennie]—an unsentimental, even comic requiem to a shrewd, stubborn, loyal, and lovable creature whose all consuming passion was food." In the Night Kitchen (1970) is "a further exploration of a boy's fantasy world, this time closely based on Sendak's childhood memories of New York life." Fox writes "the huge, flat, brightly colored illustrations" are "a tribute to the New York of Mr. Sendak's childhood, recalling the 1930s films and comic books he adored all his life." Sendak explained: "It was an homage to everything I loved: New York, immigrants, Jews, Laurel and Hardy, Mickey Mouse, King Kong, movies. I just jammed them into one cuckoo book." It has often been censored for its drawings of a young boy prancing naked through the story. The book has been challenged in several U.S. states including Illinois, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Texas. In the Night Kitchen regularly appears on the American Library Association's list of "frequently challenged and banned books". It was listed number 21 on the "100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–1999". Outside Over There (1981) the story of a girl named Ida and her sibling jealousy and responsibility. Her father is away, so Ida is left to watch her baby sister, much to her dismay. Her sister is kidnapped by goblins and Ida must go off on a magical adventure to rescue her. At first, she is not really eager to get her sister and nearly passes right by her when she becomes absorbed in the magic of the quest. In the end, she rescues her sister, destroys the goblins, and returns home committed to caring for her sister until her father returns. This rescue story includes an illustration of a ladder leaning out of the window of a home, which according to one report, was based on the crime scene in the Lindbergh kidnapping, "which terrified Sendak as a child." Carpenter and Prichard write, "More dark in subject matter than Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen, it was published on both adult and children's book lists, and showed a marked change in illustrative style, entirely away from the comic-strip manner that was always partly apparent in the other two." Sendak included a cameo from one of his favorite composers, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. A collection of his essays and lectures were published as Caldecott & Co.: Notes on Books and Pictures (1988). In 1993, Sendak published We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy, about the AIDS crisis. Later in the 1990s, Sendak approached playwright Tony Kushner to write a new English-language version of the Czech composer Hans Krása's Holocaust opera Brundibár which, remarkably, had been performed by children in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Kushner wrote the text for Sendak's illustrated book of the same name, published in 2003. The book was named one of The New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Illustrated Books of 2003. Gregory Maguire wrote: "In a career that spans 50 years and counting, as Sendak's does, there are bound to be lesser works. Brundibar is not lesser than anything." In 2011, Sendak adapted his Sesame Street short Bumble Ardy into a children's book, his first in over thirty years, and ultimately his last published work before his death. My Brother's Book (2013) was published posthumously. Dwight Garner wrote "Its charms are simmering and reflective ones. This moral fable may find its largest audience among adults."
Sendak was an early member of the National Board of Advisors of the Children's Television Workshop during the development stages of the Sesame Street television series. He created two animated stories for the series: Bumble Ardy, an animated sequence with Jim Henson as the voice of Bumble Ardy, and Seven Monsters. Sendak later adapted Seven Monsters into the book Seven Little Monsters, which itself would be adapted into an animated television series. Sendak wrote an animated musical, Really Rosie, featuring the voice of Carole King and broadcast in 1975. It is available on video (usually as part of video compilations of his work). An album of the songs was also produced. He contributed the opening segment to Simple Gifts, a Christmas collection of six animated shorts shown on PBS in 1977 and later released on VHS in 1993. He adapted Where the Wild Things Are for the stage in 1979. Additionally, he designed sets and costumes for many operas and ballets, including the award-winning Pacific Northwest Ballet 1983 production of Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker, Glyndebourne Festival Opera's productions of Prokofiev's The Love for Three Oranges (1982), Ravel's L'enfant et les sortilèges and L'heure espagnole (1987) and Knussen's adaptation of Sendak's own Higglety Pigglety Pop! or There Must Be More to Life (1985), Houston Grand Opera's productions of Mozart's The Magic Flute (1981) and Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel (1997), Los Angeles County Music Center's 1990 production of Mozart's Idomeneo, New York City Opera's production of Janáček's The Cunning Little Vixen (1981) and the Lyric Opera of Kansas City's production of Mozart's The Goose of Cairo (1982). In 2003, Chicago Opera Theatre produced Sendak and Kushner's adaptation of Brundibár. In 2005, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, in collaboration with Yale Repertory Theatre and Broadway's New Victory Theater, produced a substantially re-worked version of the Sendak-Kushner adaptation. In 2004, Sendak worked with the Shirim Klezmer Orchestra in Boston on their project Pincus and the Pig: A Klezmer Tale. This Klezmer version of Prokofiev's best-known musical story for children, Peter and the Wolf, featured Maurice Sendak as the narrator. He also illustrated the cover art. Margalit Fox writes that "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."
Sendak mentioned in a September 2008 article in The New York Times that he was gay and had lived with his partner, psychoanalyst Eugene David Glynn (February 25, 1926 – May 15, 2007), for 50 years before Glynn's death in May 2007. Revealing that he never told his parents, he said, "All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy. They never, never, never knew." Sendak's relationship with Glynn was referenced by other writers before (including Tony Kushner in 2003) and Glynn's 2007 death notice identified Sendak as his "partner of fifty years". After his partner's death, Sendak donated $1 million to the Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services in memory of Glynn, who treated young people there. The money will go to a clinic which is to be named for Glynn. Sendak was an atheist. In a 2011 interview, he said that he did not believe in God and explained that he felt that religion, and belief in God, "must have made life much easier [for some religious friends of his]. It's harder for us non-believers." In the early 1960s, Sendak lived in a basement apartment at 29 West 9th Street in Greenwich Village where he wrote and illustrated Wild Things. Later he had a nearby pied-à-terre at 40 Fifth Avenue where he worked and stayed occasionally after moving full-time to Ridgefield, Connecticut. He said: "I don't really believe that the kid I was has grown up into me. He still exists somewhere in the most graphic, plastic, physical way for me. I have tremendous concern for, and interest in, him. I try to communicate with him all the time. One of my worst fears is losing contact."
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth (October 2026), in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
