When author and illustrator Maurice Sendak entered the world of children’s books, it was a very safe place. Stories were sweet and simple and set in a world without disorder. But Sendak, who died Tuesday at age 83, broke with that tradition. In Where the Wild Things Are, Sendak explored the darker side of childhood. Upstairs in young Max’s bedroom, a jungle grows, and he sails off to a land of monsters.
John Cech, a professor of English who wrote a book about Sendak’s work, says Where the Wild Things Are fit perfectly into American culture of the 1960s. It came out just before the Beatles’ first tour of the U.S.
“It was part of that movement — the cultural revolution, we call it now — that culminated I guess at the end of the decade in the Democratic convention in Chicago and Woodstock and so many other things,” he says.
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