Some Swell Sendak! Maurice Sendak in Life, on Death, and about His Art

Some Swell Sendak

Maurice Sendak 
1928-2012

I have focused on the art of Maurice Sendak several times before on this blog but now I wanted to bring you a more comprehensive look at his life and work, and include reproductions of his artwork to show the rich variety and brilliant artistry of his illustrations and designs. Bibliography included. 

Maurice Sendak in Life, on Death, 

and about His Art

a drawing for "A Hole Is to Dig"

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, May 8, 2012 in Danbury, Connecticut. He was 83.

Roundly praised, intermittently censored and occasionally eaten, Mr. Sendak’s books were essential ingredients of childhood for the generation born after 1960, and in turn for their children [and now for their children’s 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.

Some reviewers did think the book might be too frightening for children. In a Jan. 22, 1966, New Yorker profile of Sendak, Nat Hentoff collects several of the critical responses. "We should not like to have it left about where a sensitive child might find it to pore over in the twilight," stated the Journal of Nursery Education. 

Publishers' Weekly offered a mix of praise and criticism, saying that "the plan and technique of the illustrations are superb. … But they may well prove frightening, accompanied as they are by a pointless and

confusing story." 

Library Journal's critic wrote, "This is the kind of story that many adults will question and for many reasons, but the child will accept it wisely and without inhibition, as he knows it is written for him."

Perhaps the most insightful review harvested by Hentoff came from the Cleveland Press: "Boys and girls may have to shield their parents from this book. Parents are very easily scared."

Sendak didn't limit his career to a safe and successful formula of conventional children's books, though it was the pictures he did for wholesome works such as Ruth Krauss' "A Hole Is To Dig" and Else Holmelund Minarik's "Little Bear" that launched his career.

Little Bear

Among the other titles he wrote and illustrated, all from Harper & Row, are “In the Night Kitchen” (1970) and “Outside Over There” (1981), which together with “Where the Wild Things Are” form a trilogy; “The Sign on Rosie’s Door” (1960); “Higglety Pigglety Pop!” (1967); and “The Nutshell Library” (1962), a boxed set of four tiny volumes comprising “Alligators All Around,” “Chicken Soup with Rice,” “One Was Johnny” and “Pierre.”

from "In the Night Kitchen"

from "Outside Over There"

from "The Sign on Rosie's Door"

from "Nutshell Library: Chicken Soup with Rice"

In September [2011], a new picture book by Mr. Sendak, “Bumble-Ardy” — the first in 30 years for which he produced both text and illustrations — was issued by HarperCollins Publishers. The book, which spent five weeks on the New York Times children’s best-seller list, tells the not-altogether-lighthearted story of an orphaned pig (his parents are eaten) who gives himself a riotous birthday party.

Mr. Sendak [said] that he worked on Bumble-Ardy while taking care of his longtime partner, Eugene Glynn, who died of lung cancer in 2007.

"When I did Bumble-Ardy, I was so intensely aware of death," he says. "Eugene, my friend and partner, was dying here in the house when I did Bumble-Ardy. 

"I did Bumble-Ardy to save myself. I did not want to die with him. I wanted to live as any human being does. But there's no question that the book was affected by what was going on here in the house…

Bumble-Ardy was a combination of the deepest pain and the wondrous feeling of coming into my own.”

A posthumous picture book, “My Brother’s Book” — a poem written and illustrated by Mr. Sendak and inspired by his love for his late brother, Jack — is scheduled to be published next February. [It is now available]

His art graced the writing of other eminent authors for children and adults, including Hans Christian Andersen, Leo Tolstoy, Herman Melville, William Blake and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Mr. Sendak’s characters are headstrong, bossy, even obnoxious. (In “Pierre,” “I don’t care!” is the response of the small eponymous hero to absolutely everything.) 

His pictures are often unsettling. His plots are fraught with rupture: children are kidnapped, parents disappear, a dog lights out from her comfortable home.

from "Hector Protector"

A largely self-taught illustrator, Mr. Sendak was at his finest a shtetl Blake, portraying a luminous world, at once lovely and dreadful, suspended between wakefulness and dreaming. In so doing, he was able to convey both the propulsive abandon and the pervasive melancholy of children’s interior lives.

His visual style could range from intricately crosshatched scenes that recalled 19th-century prints to airy watercolors reminiscent of Chagall to bold, bulbous figures inspired by the comic books he loved all his life, with outsized feet that the page could scarcely contain. He never did learn to draw feet, he often said.

In 1964, the American Library Association awarded Mr. Sendak the Caldecott Medal considered the Pulitzer Prize of children’s book illustration, for “Where the Wild Things Are.” 

In simple, incantatory language, the book told the story of Max, a naughty boy who rages at his mother and is sent to his room without supper. A pocket Odysseus, Max promptly sets sail:

And he sailed off through night and day

and in and out of weeks

and almost over a year

to where the wild things are.

There, Max leads the creatures in a frenzied rumpus before sailing home, anger spent, to find his supper waiting.

As portrayed by Mr. Sendak, the wild things are deliciously grotesque: huge, snaggletoothed, exquisitely [hairy] and glowering maniacally. He always maintained he was drawing his relatives — who, in his memory at least, had hovered like a pack of middle-aged gargoyles above the childhood sickbed to which he was often confined. These aunts and uncles always said that they wanted to “eat him up.”

from "Kenny's Window"

Maurice Bernard Sendak was born in Brooklyn on June 10, 1928; his father, Philip, worked in the garment district of Manhattan. Family photographs show the infant Maurice, or Murray as he was then known, as a plump, round-faced, slanting-eyed, droopy-lidded, arching-browed creature — looking, in other words, exactly like a baby in a Maurice Sendak illustration. Mr. Sendak adored drawing babies, in all their fleshy petulance.

Sendak used the photo of himself as a baby for this drawing
in "Fly by Night"

Does this baby look familiar? From "Higglety Pigglety Pop!"

This baby is not a self-portrait, but definitely fits the description "fleshy,"
from "Juniper Tree: The Goblins," frontispiece

In the book "In Grandpa's House," Maurice Sendak's father Philip Sendak relates the story of his early life, and his immigration to America. He has this to say about the family circumstances at the time of the birth of his third child Maurice: 

      "...I left to start our own factory, which we called Lucky Stitching.
      "Jackie was born. He looked like an old man, thin and homely. Then he grew more beautiful.

      "Four years later Wall Street crashed, and because business was bad, our factory had to close down. I went to look for a job again.

      "Maurice was born. Dr. Brummer said the child would not have a natural birth. The doctor put his instruments in a big pot and boiled them. With the tongs he took the little head and turned it, and Maurice came out all by himself...Maurice's laugh was a little bell."

from "In Grandpa's House"

Mr. Sendak was reared in a world of looming terrors: the Depression; World War II; the Holocaust; the seemingly infinite vulnerability of children to danger. The annihilation of the family during the Holocaust created a profound sense of guilt even in the young Maurice, who wrestled with the topic throughout his life. His 2003 Brundibar is a magisterial distillation of this theme. The Yiddish language and Jewish customs that filled his household infused most of his books with Old World stories, images, and an ever-present sense of loss.

Mr. Sendak was sickly as a child and could rarely join other children in their play, but his gift for storytelling brought the whole neighborhood to the front steps of the Sendak home, where he would regale them with stories. He was captivated by news stories and cultural developments of the 1920s and 1930s alike, from the introduction of Mickey Mouse in 1928 (the source of a lifelong collecting interest in his “1928 twin”), to the New York World’s Fair in 1939 (where his older sister ditched him, an experience he transformed into In the Night Kitchen in 1971).

He experienced the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby in 1932 as a personal torment: if that fair-haired, blue-eyed princeling could not be kept safe, what certain peril lay in store for him, little Murray Sendak, in his humble apartment in Bensonhurst?

An image from the Lindbergh crime scene — a ladder leaning against the side of a house — would find its way into “Outside Over There,” in which a baby is carried off by goblins.

from"Outside Over There"

"We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy"

As Mr. Sendak grew up — lower class, Jewish, gay — he felt permanently shunted to the margins of things. His lifelong melancholia showed in his work, in picture books like “We Are All in the Dumps With Jack and Guy” (1993), a parable about homeless children in the age of AIDS. It showed in his habits. He could be dyspeptic and solitary, working in his white clapboard home deep in the Connecticut countryside with only Mozart, Melville, Mickey Mouse and his dog for company. It showed in his everyday interactions with people, especially those blind to the seriousness of his enterprise. “A woman came up to me the other day and said, ‘You’re the kiddie-book man!’ ” Mr. Sendak told Vanity Fair last year. “I wanted to kill her.”

But Mr. Sendak could also be warm and forthright, if not quite gregarious. He was a man of many enthusiasms — for music, art, literature, argument and the essential rightness of children’s perceptions of the world around them. He was also a mentor to a generation of younger writers and illustrators for children, several of whom, including Arthur Yorinks, Richard Egielski and Paul O. Zelinsky, went on to prominent careers of their own.

from "Atomics for the Millions"

As far back as he could remember, Mr. Sendak had loved to draw. That and looking out the window had helped him pass the long hours in bed. While he was still in high school — at Lafayette in Brooklyn — he worked part time for All-American Comics, filling in backgrounds for book versions of the “Mutt and Jeff” comic strip. His first professional illustrations were for a physics textbook, “Atomics for the Millions,” published in 1947.

from "The Wonderful Farm"

In 1948, at 20, he took a job building window displays for F. A. O. Schwarz. Through the store’s children’s book buyer, he was introduced to Ursula Nordstrom, the distinguished editor of children’s books at Harper & Row. The meeting, the start of a long, fruitful collaboration, led to Mr. Sendak’s first children’s book commission: illustrating “The Wonderful Farm.” by Marcel Aymé, published in 1951.

Under Ms. Nordstrom’s guidance, Mr. Sendak went on to illustrate books by other well-known children’s authors, including several by Ruth Krauss, notably “A Hole Is to Dig” (1952), and Else Holmelund Minarik’s “Little Bear” series. 

from "Kenny's Window"

The first title he wrote and illustrated himself, “Kenny's Window," published in 1956, was a moody, dreamlike story about a lonely boy’s inner life.

Mr. Sendak’s books were often a window on his own experience. “Higglety Pigglety Pop! Or, There Must Be More to Life” was a valentine to Jennie, his beloved Sealyham terrier, who died shortly before the book was published.

At the start of the story, Jennie, who has everything a dog could want — including “a round pillow upstairs and a square pillow downstairs” — packs her bags and sets off on her own, pining for adventure. She finds it on the stage of the World Mother Goose Theatre, where she becomes a leading lady. Every day, and twice on Saturdays, Jennie, who looks rather like a mop herself, eats a mop made out of salami. This makes her very happy.

“Hello,” Jennie writes in a satisfyingly articulate letter to her master. “As you probably noticed, I went away forever. I am very experienced now and very famous. I am even a star. ... I get plenty to drink too, so don’t worry.”

A young Sendak with Jennie

By contrast, the huge, flat, brightly colored illustrations of “In the Night Kitchen,” the story of a boy’s journey through a fantastic nocturnal cityscape, are a tribute to the New York of Mr. Sendak’s childhood, recalling the 1930s films and comic books he adored all his life. (The bakers who toil in the night kitchen are the spit and image of Oliver Hardy.)

from "In the Night Kitchen"

Mr. Sendak’s later books could be much darker. “Brundibar” (2003), with text by the playwright Tony Kushner, is a picture book based on an opera performed by the children of the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

The opera, also called “Brundibar,” had been composed in 1938 by Hans Krasa, a Czech Jew who later died in Auschwitz.

Reviewing the book in The New York Times Book Review, the novelist and children’s book author Gregory Maguire called it “a capering picture book crammed with melodramatic menace and comedy both low and grand.” 

But it was "Brundibar," a folk tale about two children who need to earn enough money to buy milk for their sick mother that Sendak completed when he was 75, of which he was most proud. "This is the closest thing to a perfect child I've ever had."

With Mr. Kushner, Mr. Sendak collaborated on a stage version of the opera, performed in 2006 at the New Victory Theater in New York.

Despite its wild popularity, Mr. Sendak’s work was not always well received critically. Some early reviews of “Where the Wild Things Are” expressed puzzlement and outright unease.

“In the Night Kitchen,” which depicts its young hero, Mickey, in the nude, prompted many school librarians to bowdlerize the book by drawing a diaper over Mickey's nether region.

But these were minority responses. Mr. Sendak’s other awards include the Hans Christian Andersen Award for Illustration, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award and, in 1996, the National Medal of the Arts, presented by the President of the United States. Twenty-two of his titles have been named New York Times best-illustrated books of the year.

"I write books as an old man, but in this country you have to be categorized, and I guess a little boy swimming in the nude in a bowl of milk (as in `In the Night Kitchen') can't be called an adult book," he told The Associated Press in 2003.

"So I write books that seem more suitable for children, and that's OK with me. They are a better audience and tougher critics. Kids tell you what they think, not what they think they should think."

Maurice Sendak in Munich, Germany, 1971

From Maurice Sendak's Caldecott Medal Acceptance

This talk will be an attempt to answer a question. It is one that is frequently put to me, and it goes something like this: Where did you ever get such a crazy, scary idea for a book? Of course the question refers to Where the Wild Things Are. My on-the-spot answer always amounts to an evasive “Out of my head.” And that usually provokes a curious and sympathetic stare at my unfortunate head, as though--à la Dr. Jekyll—I were about to prove my point by sprouting horns and a neat row of pointy fangs. …

I believe I can try to answer it now if it is rephrased as follows: What is your vision of the truth, and what has it to do with children?

Last fall, soon after finishing Where the Wild Things Are, I sat on the front porch of my parents’ house in Brooklyn and witnessed a scene [that could have been given the title] “Arnold the Monster.”

Arnold was a tubby, pleasant-faced little boy who could instantly turn himself into a howling, groaning, hunched horror. His willing victims were four giggling little girls, whom he chased frantically around parked automobiles and up and down front steps. The girls would flee, hiccupping and shrieking, “Oh, help! Save me! The monster will eat me!” And Arnold would lumber after them, rolling his eyes and bellowing. The noise was ear-splitting, the proceedings were fascinating. …

The game ended in a collapse of exhaustion. Arnold dragged himself away, and the girls went off with a look of sweet peace on their faces. A mysterious inner battle had been played out, and their minds and bodies were at rest, for the moment.

I have watched children play many variations of this game. They are the necessary games children must conjure up to combat…fear, anger, hate, frustration—all the emotions that are an ordinary part of their lives… To master these forces, children turn to fantasy: that imagined world where disturbing emotional situations are solved to their satisfaction. Through fantasy, Max, the hero of my book, discharges his anger against his mother, and returns to the real world sleepy, hungry, and at peace with himself. …

What is too often overlooked is the fact that from their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions, that fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, that they continually cope with frustration as best they can. And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things.

It is my involvement with this inescapable fact of childhood—the awful vulnerability of children and their struggle to make themselves King of All Wild Things—that gives my work whatever truth and passion it may have.

                                                                                               [1964]

from "Outside Over There"

Many of Maurice Sendak’s books had second lives on stage and screen. Among the most notable adaptations are the operas “Where the Wild Things Are” and “Higglety Pigglety Pop!” by the British composer Oliver Knussen, and a collaboration with Carole King: “Really Rosie,” a musical version of “The Sign on Rosie’s Door,” which appeared on television as an animated special in 1975 and on the Off Broadway stage in 1980.

Theater poster for stage production

In 2009, a feature film version of “Where the Wild Things Are” — part live action, part animated — by the director Spike Jonze opened to favorable notices. Maurice Sendak said that the film reflected more of what he originally intended for the story of Max and his Wild Things.

scene from the film "Where the Wild Things Are"

In the 1970s, Mr. Sendak began designing sets and costumes for adaptations of his own work and, eventually, the work of others. His first venture was Mr. Knussen’s “Wild Things,” for which Mr. Sendak also wrote the libretto. Performed in a scaled-down version in Brussels in 1980, the opera had its full premiere four years later, to great acclaim, staged in London by the Glyndebourne Touring Opera.

"The Cunning Little Vixen" sets and costumes by Sendak

With the theater director Frank Corsaro, he also created sets for several venerable operas, among them Mozart’s “Magic Flute,” performed by the Houston Grand Opera in 1980, and Leos Janacek’s “Cunning Little Vixen” for the New York City Opera in 1981.

For the Pacific Northwest Ballet, Mr. Sendak designed sets and costumes for a 1983 production of Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker”; a film version was released in 1986.

A playful Sendak with a Nutcracker illustration

Among Mr. Sendak’s recent books is his only pop-up book, “Mommy?” published by Scholastic in 2006, with a scenario by Mr. Yorinks and incredible paper engineering by Matthew Reinhart.

Though he understood children deeply, Mr. Sendak by no means valorized them unconditionally. “Dear Mr. Sun Deck ...” he could drone with affected boredom, imitating the forced-march school letter-writing projects of which he was the frequent, if dubious, beneficiary.

But he cherished the letters that individual children sent him unbidden, which burst with the sparks that his work had ignited.

“ 'Dear Mr. Sendak,' read one, from an 8-year-old boy. 'How much does it cost to get to where the wild things are? If it is not expensive, my sister and I would like to spend the summer there. Please answer soon.'  I did not answer that question, for I have no doubt that sooner or later they will find their way, free of charge."

"Despite the fact that I don't write with children in mind, I long ago discovered that they make the best audience. They certainly make the best critics. ...When children love your book, it's 'I love your book, thank you. I want to marry you when I grow up.'  Or it's 'Dear Mr. Sendak: I hate your book. Hope you die soon. Cordially...' "

"Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, 'Dear Jim: I loved your card.'  Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, 'Jim loved your card so much he ate it.'  That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it."

 Sendak in his studio with Roger Sutton of Horn Book Magazine

Here is another excerpt from "In Grandpa's House" by Philip Sendak:     "I lived my whole life in Brooklyn, and everything was alright. My wife was never ill. Now I am alone. I have lost my wife, and everything is a blank to me. When I close my eyes, I see her and she wants to talk. I ask her what she wants, but she doesn't answer.
      "My children try to make me forget. My son asks me to write a children's story. I have tried many times, but nothing comes. When I was young, I heard so many stories and was able to tell wonderful tales. Now I am seventy-five, I can no longer imagine myself in a child's life.
      "But since I have nothing else to do, I will write a story that my father told us when I was a child.
      "Little children, be still! I will tell you a story, my papa would say. And when it was quiet, and the children opened their mouths and ears, he began his tale."

This legacy of story, of sorrow, and of struggle was given to his son, along with a marvelous ability to paint it.

Maurice Sendak on his property in Connecticut

Just before he passed away, Maurice Sendak spoke with NPR commentator Terry Gross and during this very emotional interview he said: "I have nothing now but praise for my life. I'm not unhappy. I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can't stop them. They leave me and I love them more. ... What I dread is the isolation. ... There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I'm ready..."

A final word about Maurice Sendak's last work, published posthumously, "My Brother's Book," from an article in Publishers' Weekly:

from "My Brother's Book"

Sendak was already in the hospital when he saw the final layout; he was “delighted, ecstatic” with it, di Capua [his editor] remembers. It was his last look at the book. He died four days later...

At the end of a 2006 New Yorker profile, Sendak said, “When my brother Jack died, I wanted to do something extraordinary for him. Five years later, I had an idea. The poem I wrote was very dark. I hope to finish it.” 

He did finish it, and in the finishing it grew to be more than just a poem for Jack. It was a fearless and tender look at his own fate, and a farewell gift to all who loved his work.

with his friend Herman

Excerpted from obituaries, interviews, speeches, and articles from the Associated Press, published in the Huffington Post, The New York Times in May of 2012, from Rosenbach.org, and also from a New Yorker article by Nat Hentoff.

Bibliography

cover drawing for "Caldecott & Co."

Books Written and Illustrated by Maurice Sendak 

1956 Kenny's Window

1957 Very Far Away

1960 The Sign on Rosie's Door 

1962 The Nutshell Library

•  Alligators All Around (An Alphabet)
•  Chicken Soup with Rice (A Book of Months)
•  One Was Johnny (A Counting Book)
•  Pierre (A Cautionary Tale)

1963 Where the Wild Things Are

1967 Higglety Pigglety Pop! Or, There Must Be More to Life

1970 In the Night Kitchen

1970 Ten Little Rabbits: A Counting Book with Mino the Magician

1975 Maurice Sendak’s Really Rosie Starring the Nutshell Kids (with songs by Carole King)

1975 Seven Little Monsters (this is the date of the first publication of this work which was in Switzerland, first U.S. edition: 1977)

1976 Posters by Maurice Sendak

1976 Some Swell Pup or Are You Sure You Want a Dog? (with co-author Matthew Margolis)
1981 Fantasy Sketches

1981 Outside Over There

1988 Cover art for Caldecott and Co: Notes on Books and Pictures (an anthology of essays on children’s literature)

1995 Maurice Sendak’s Christmas Mystery (a box containing a book and jigsaw puzzle)

2011 Bumble-Ardy

2013 My Brother’s Book, published posthumously

Illustrated by Maurice Sendak and Written by Other Authors

1947 Atomics for the Millions (Dr. Maxwell Leigh Eidinoff)
1951 The Wonderful Farm (Marcel Aymé)

1951 Good Shabbos Everybody (Robert Garvey)

1952 A Hole is to Dig: A First Book of First Definitions (Ruth Krauss)

1952 Maggie Rose, Her Birthday Christmas (Ruth Sawyer)

1953 A Very Special House (Ruth Krauss)

1953 Hurry Home Candy (Meindert DeJong)

1953 The Giant Story (Beatrice Schenk de Regniers)

1954 I’ll Be You and You Be Me (Ruth Krauss)

1954 Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s Farm (Betty MacDonald)

1954 The Tin Fiddle (Edward Tripp)

1954 The Wheel on the School (Meindert DeJong)
1955 Charlotte and the White Horse (Ruth Krauss)

1955 Happy Hanukah Everybody (Hyman and Alice Chanover

1955 Little Cow & the Turtle (Meindert DeJong)

1955 Singing Family of the Cumberlands (Jean Ritchie)

1955 Seven Little Stories on Big Subjects (Gladys Baker Bond)

1955 What Can You Do with a Shoe? (Beatrice Schenk de Regniers) reissued in 1997 with full-color illustrations

1956 The Happy Rain (Jack Sendak, Maurice Sendak’s brother)

1956 The House of Sixty Fathers (Meindert DeJong)

1956 I Want to Paint My Bathroom Blue (Ruth Krauss)

1957 The Birthday Party (Ruth Krauss)

1957 Circus Girl (by Jack Sendak, Maurice Sendak’s brother)

1957-1968 Little Bear Series (Else Holmelund Minarik).

•  Little Bear (1957)
•  Father Bear Comes Home (1959)
•  Little Bear's Friend (1960)
•  Little Bear's Visit (1961)
•  A Kiss for Little Bear (1968)

1957 You Can’t Get There from Here (Ogden Nash)

1958 Along Came a Dog (Meindert DeJong)

1958 No Fighting, No Biting! (Else Holmelund Minarik)

1958 What Do You Say, Dear? (Sesyle Joslin)

1959 Seven Tales by H. C. Andersen (Eva Le Gallienne, translator)

1959 The Moon Jumpers (Janice May Udry)

1960 Open House for Butterflies (Ruth Krauss)

1960 Windy Wash Day and Other Poems (Dorothy Aldis) for the collection: Best in Children's Books: Volume 31

1960 Dwarf Long-Nose (Wilhelm Hauff, author; Doris Orgel, translator)

1961 What the Good-Man Does Is Always Right (Hans Christian Andersen) for the collection: Best in Children's Books: Volume 41 

1961 Let's Be Enemies (Janice May Udry)

1961 What Do You Do, Dear? (Sesyle Joslin)

1961 Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present (Charlotte Zolotow)

1962 The Big Green Book (by Robert Graves)
1962 The Singing Hill (Meindert DeJong)

1963 The Bat-Poet (Randall Jarrell)

1963 The Griffin and the Minor Canon (Frank R. Stockton)

1963 How Little Lori Visited Times Square (Amos Vogel)

1963 Sarah’s Room (Doris Orgel)

1963 She Loves Me...She Loves Me Not... (Robert Keeshan, aka Captain Kangaroo)
1964 The Bee-Man of Orn (Frank R. Stockton)

1965 The Animal Family (Randall Jarrell)

1965 Hector Protector and As I Went Over the Water: Two Nursery Rhymes (traditional)

1965 Lullabies and Night Songs (Alec Wilder, composer; William Engvick, editor) 

1966 Zlateh The Goat and Other Stories (Isaac Bashevis Singer)

1967 The Golden Key (George MacDonald)

1969 The Light Princess (George MacDonald)

1971 Somebody Else’s Nut Tree and Other Tales from Children (Ruth Krauss)

1972 Cover art and design for Down the Rabbit Hole: Adventures and Misadventures in the Realm of Children’s Literature (Selma G. Lanes)

1973 King Grisly-Beard: A Tale from the Brothers Grimm (Edgar Taylor, translator)

1973 The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from Grimm (Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, selected by Lore Segal and Maurice Sendak, translated by Lore Segal and Randall Jarrell)

1974 Cover art for Hans Christian Andersen: The Complete Fairy Tales & Stories, translated from the Danish by Erik Christian Haugaard

1975 Pleasant Fieldmouse (Jan Wahl)

1976 Fly by Night (Randall Jarrell)

1977 Shadrach (Meindert DeJong)

1978 The Big Green Book (Robert Graves)

1979 Frontispiece for The Portent (George MacDonald)

1983 Jacket drawing for Kleist, a Biography (Joachim Maass)

1984 The Love for Three Oranges: The Glyndebourne Version (Frank Corsaro, author with Maurice Sendak, based on L'Amour des Trois Oranges, by Serge Prokofiev)

1984 Nutcracker (E.T.A. Hoffman)

1985 In Grandpa's House (Philip Sendak, Maurice Sendak’s father)

1985 The Cunning Little Vixen (Rudolf Tesnohlidek)

1988 Dear Mili (Wilhelm Grimm)

1988 Story Poems for the collection Sing a Song of Popcorn: Every Child’s Book of Poems (selected by Beatrice Schenk de Regniers, Eva Moore, Mary Michaels White, and Jan Carr)

1990 Cover Art and Illustration for the collection The Big Book for Peace (various authors and illustrators) 
1992 I Saw Esau: The Schoolchild’s Pocket Book (Iona and Peter Opie, editors)

1993 We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy: Two Nursery Rhymes
1995 The Miami Giant (Arthur Yorinks)

1995 Pierre: or, The Ambiguities: The Kraken Edition (Herman Melville)
1996 Frank & Joey Go to Work (a board book, written and directed by Arthur Yorinks; set and costumes by Maurice Sendak; photography by Ky Chung)

1996 Frank & Joey Eat Lunch (a board book, written and directed by Arthur Yorinks; set and costumes by Maurice Sendak; photography by Ky Chung)

1997 What Can You Do with a Shoe? (Beatrice Schenk de Regniers) a reissue with full-color illustrations

1998 Penthesilea (Heinrich von Kleist, author; Joel Agee, translator)

1998 Swine Lake (James Marshall)

2000 Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom (Ursula Nordstrom, author; Leonard S. Marcus, editor)

2000 A Perfect Friend (Reynolds Price) 
2003 Brundibar (Tony Kushner)

2005 Bears! (Ruth Krauss) this story was originally published with illustrations by Phyllis Rowand in 1948 by Harper & Bros.

2006 Mommy? [Sendak’s only pop-up book] (Scenario by Arthur Yorinks, Paper Engineering by Matthew Reinhart)

Books Written About Sendak and his Work. 

Making Mischief: A Maurice Sendak Appreciation. Gregory Maguire 2009

The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present. Tony Kushner 2003

Angels and Wild Things: The Archetypal Poetics of Maurice Sendak. John Cech 1996 

Maurice Sendak. Amy Sonheim 1991 

The Art of Maurice Sendak. Selma Lanes 1980