Maurice Sendak, a children’s author best known for his book Where the Wild Things Are, passed away on Tuesday, May 8.
Ellen Handler Spitz, honors college professor of visual arts, wrote about Sendak for The New Republic in a piece entitled “Remembering Maurice Sendak, Who Brought Loneliness to Children’s Literature,” which appeared on the website on May 9.
“Sendak knew from within the profound sense in which every child, from time to time, perceives himself or herself to be alone—an outsider—and feels the need to retreat into some private space, some nook or secret hiding place. Sendak’s books are themselves such places; they can so function even when being read aloud by an adult. Sendak’s supreme gift, as visual artist as well as author, was to discover pictorial as well as verbal and narrative means to portray the existential separateness of childhood,” she wrote.
