Maurice Sendak has died at age 83.
Great interview: “I refuse to lie to children.”
Shit.
RIP, Maurice. You meant a lot to the library I started out with, and I know you’ll be missed.
Let the wild rumpus begin in his honor…
Nooooo! 
And he sailed off through night and day and in and out of weeks…
I hope he’s where the wild things are.
Aw damn.
The guy was a curmudgeon’s curmudgeon. I loved his comments about his own books: “I don’t write children’s books; I write books and people think they’re for children.”
My Sendak moment? His reccent interview with, of all people, Stephen Colbert. It was hilarious as hell!
We have a “Wild Rumpus” parade in my town every October where people dress up as monsters and play music in the streets. He inspired a lot of people and wrote some of my favorite childhood books. RIP!
“Then from far away across the world he smelled good things to eat, so he gave up being king of the wild things"
RIP.
Oh, please don’t go! We’ll eat you up! We love you so!
He was always a favorite in our house when I was growing up. Where the Wild Things Are was the big hit, of course - we had a giant poster version of the cover - but I also remember reading and hearing In the Night Kitchen, Chicken Soup with Rice, Pierre. Around the time I was born my parents had cats named Lobel and Sendak.
In elementary school, we made a stop-motion film version of Where the Wild Things Are, with the characters made from paper cutouts. I loved that book. (I also liked the film version.) And Steven Colbert did a hilarious interview with Sendak a few months ago.
Yes, he was an unapologetic curmudgeon - and after a couple of minutes you realize that was totally consistent with everything he wrote. Here’s Part 1 and here’s Part 2.
His curmudgeonry is much better to witness in an interview than in print. It allowed his personality to show.
83 years old is a good run, but … damn. The world lost a lil something.
I’m not sure if it was in the Colbert interview, but somewhere I saw an explanation of the source of the “wild things.” Basically, as a child, he and his family would visit older relatives, most or all of whom were European refugees. So these older people would gather round him and do things like pinch his cheeks and talk in a language he didn’t understand, and he translated them into the “wild things.”
I still remember his animation and lyrics for Really Rosie.