Image courtesy of the NY Times.
"Maurice Sendak, widely considered the most important children’s
book artist of the 20th century, who 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, died
on Tuesday in Danbury, Conn. He was 83 and lived in Ridgefield, Conn.
The cause was complications from a recent stroke, said Michael di Capua, his longtime editor.
Roundly
praised, intermittently censored and occasionally eaten, Mr. Sendak’s
books were essential ingredients of childhood for the generation born
after 1960 or thereabouts, and in turn for their children. He was known
in particular for more than a dozen picture books he wrote and
illustrated himself, most famously 'Where the Wild Things Are,' which
was simultaneously genre-breaking and career-making when it was
published by Harper & Row in 1963."
