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Amidst America’s Book Banning Plague, We Celebrate Maurice Sendak [1]
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Date: 2023-06-11
“Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are has been crowned the greatest children’s book ever in a BBC Culture poll of book experts from around the world, with Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland clocking in second and Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking coming third,” The Bookseller’s Sian Bayley recently reported. The Brooklyn Public Library – which last year celebrated its 125th birthday – listed Sendak’s Where the Wild This Are as the most borrowed book in its history. At the same time, Sendak’s book, according to the American Library Association, continues to be among those books challenged by book banners. The ALA reported that total book challenges in 2022, exceeded 2021, and if the trend that Moms for Liberty and other conservative groups and individuals are pursuing continues, 2023 will be a banner year for book banners.
Maurice Sendak (1928-2012) would have been 95 on June 10. Born in Brooklyn, New York, to Polish-Jewish immigrant parents, Sendak was known for more than a dozen books he wrote and illustrated himself, most famously his 1963 bestseller "Where the Wild Things Are," which “revolutionized the children’s book genre by delving into the emotional complexity of childhood,” the Observer Voice recently noted. “Sendak’s detailed and imaginative illustrations, combined with his ability to capture a range of childhood emotions, made the book an instant classic,” OV reported.
But evidently, that wasn’t his favorite book. That would be 1981’s "Outside Over There." Nor was “Where the Wild Things Are” his most controversial book. That would be his 1970 award winning “In the Night Kitchen," which was about a boy who dreams of flying to a magical kitchen. The boy also happens to lose his clothes early in the book, and images of a naked flying boy placed the book on the American Library Association’s list of “frequently challenged and banned books.”
In September 2011, HarperCollins published Sendak’s "Bumble-Ardy," his first new book in 30 years. Sendak remained publicly closeted most of his life, despite a fifty-year relationship with his partner, psychoanalyst Dr. Eugene Glynn. Sendak wasn’t even out to his Polish-Jewish parents whose relatives died in the Holocaust. “All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy,” he once said. “They never, never, never knew.”
Glynn died in May 2007, and Sendak came out in a 2008 interview, saying that the idea of a gay man writing children books would have hurt his career when he was in his 20s and 30s. Upon his death in 2012 at the age of 83, The New York Times hailed him as “the most important children’s book artist of the 20th century.”
In a 2011 interview with NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, Sendak, an atheist, explained 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.”
Another picture book, "My Brother’s Book," was posthumously released in 2013.
Last year, in the first exhibition since his death, the Columbus Museum of Art, working with the Maurice Sendak Foundation, presented a exhibition called “Wild Things Are Happening: The Art of Maurice Sendak.” which featured a wide range of his work, including his work as a designer for opera, theater, film, and television.
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