Some parents’ groups decried the story, protesting the depiction of a child yelling at his mother and running away from home.
It was an immediate sensation, hailed critically and commercially, and it received the Caldecott Medal, awarded to the best American picture book for children published that year. Just before committing the final drawings to paper, Sendak changed his wild horses into more ambiguous “wild things,” using the translation of the Yiddish expression “vildechaya,” which is common slang for a rambunctious child. One of his early attempts was a story of a boy who threw a temper tantrum, was banished to his room, and ran away to the place that gave the story its title, Where the Wild Horses Are. It was an immediate success, and Sendak went on to write more of his own material. In 1956, Sendak published his first “solo” book, Kerry’s Window. Singer‘s collection Zlateh the Goat, a retelling of Eastern European Jewish folktales. Sendak drew pictures for children’s books for most of the 1950s, notably illustrating I.B.
Following a 1951 meeting with an editor at Harper, he illustrated his first picture book, and soon became a popular and in-demand illustrator of other people’s books–most famously the Little Bear series. Sendak’s first professional commissions, in the late 1940s, included contributing illustrations to a textbook, Atomics for the Millions, and creating window displays for the toy store F.A.O. It is most frequently seen in his costumes and scenery, and in his nonlinear storytelling with Yiddish-specked sentences. He later drew on these childhood stories for his source material, and in much of his work there is a shadow of old Eastern European shtetl life. Listening to these stories, his father’s “old country” became, for young Maurice, a mythical place, both adored and feared. Early in life, he developed health problems and was forced to remain in bed for much of his youth, accompanied only by books, his own imagination, and his father’s stories. The child of Polish, Jewish immigrants, Sendak was born in Brooklyn in 1928. Photo courtesy of Spike55151 Brooklyn Born
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