NEW YORK (AP) - Maurice Sendak didn't think of himself as a
children's author, but as an author who told the truth about
childhood.

"I like interesting people and kids are really interesting
people," he explained to The Associated Press last fall. "And if
you didn't paint them in little blue, pink and yellow, it's even
more interesting."

Sendak, who died early Tuesday in Danbury, Conn., at age 83,
four days after suffering a stroke, revolutionized children's books
and how we think about childhood simply by leaving in what so many
writers before had excluded. Dick and Jane were no match for his
naughty Max. His kids misbehaved and didn't regret it, and in their
dreams and nightmares fled to the most unimaginable places.
Monstrous creatures were devised from his studio, but none more
frightening than the grownups in his stories or the cloud of the
Holocaust that darkened his every page.

"From their earliest years children live on familiar terms with
disrupting emotions - fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of
their everyday lives, they continually cope with frustrations as
best they can," he said upon receiving the Caldecott Medal in 1964
for "Where the Wild Things Are," his signature book. "And it is
through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best
means they have for taming wild things."

Rarely was a man so uninterested in being loved or adored.
Starting with the Caldecott, the great parade marched on and on. He
received the Hans Christian Andersen award in 1970 and a Laura
Ingalls Wilder medal in 1983. President Bill Clinton awarded Sendak
a National Medal of the Arts in 1996 and in 2009 President Obama
read "Where the Wild Things Are" for the Easter Egg Roll.

Communities attempted to ban him, but his books sold millions of
copies and his curmudgeonly persona became as much a part of his
legend as "Where the Wild Things Are," which became a hit movie
in 2009. He seemed to act out everyone's fantasy of a nasty old man
with a hidden and generous heart. No one granted the privilege
could forget his snarly smile, his raspy, unprintable and adorable
dismissals of such modern piffle as e-books and publicity tours,
his misleading insistence that his life didn't matter.

"I didn't sleep with famous people or movie stars or anything
like that. It's a common story: Brooklyn boy grows up and succeeds
in his profession, period," he told the AP.

Sendak's other books, standard volumes in so many children's
bedrooms, included "Chicken Soup With Rice," "One was Johnny,"
"Pierre," "Outside Over There" and "Brundibar," a folk tale
about two children who need to earn enough money to buy milk for
their sick mother.

"This is the closest thing to a perfect child I've ever had,"
he told the AP.

Besides illustrating his own work, he also provided drawings -
sometimes sweet, sometimes nasty - for Else Holmelund Minarik's
series "Little Bear," George MacDonald's "The Light Princess"
and adaptations of E.T.A. Hoffman's "The Nutcracker" and the
Brothers Grimm's "King Grisly-Beard." His most recent book that
he wrote and illustrated was "Bumble-Ardy," a naughty pig party
which came out in 2011, based on an old animated skit he worked up
for "Sesame Street."

In recent months, he had said he was working on a project about
noses and he endorsed - against his best judgment - Stephen
Colbert's "I am a Pole (And So Can You!)", a children's story
calculated to offend the master. Colbert's book was published
Tuesday.

"His art gave us a fantastical but unromanticized reminder of
what childhood truly felt like," Colbert said in a statement. "We
are all honored to have been briefly invited into his world."

Sendak also created costumes for ballets and staged operas,
including the Czech opera "Brundibar," which in 2003 he put on
paper with his close friend, Pulitzer-winning playwright Tony
Kushner. He designed sets for several productions at New York City
Opera and he wrote the libretto for composer Oliver Knussen's opera
adaptation of "Where the Wild Things Are," which premiered at
Brussels' Theatre de la Monnaie in 1980 as "Max et les
Maximontres." A revised final version debuted in 1984 in London.

He designed the Pacific Northwest Ballet's "Nutcracker"
production that later became a movie shown on television, and he
served as producer of various animated TV series based on his
illustrations, including "Seven Little Monsters," "George and
Martha" and "Little Bear." He collaborated with Carole King on
the musical "Really Rosie."

None of Sendak's books were memoirs, but all were personal, if
only for their celebrations of disobedience and intimations of fear
and death and dislocation, sketched in haunting, Blakean waves of
pen and ink. "It's a Jewish way of getting through life," Kushner
said last fall. "You acknowledge what is spectacular and beautiful
and also you don't close your eyes to the pain and the
difficulty."

"He drew children in a realistic way, as opposed to an
idealized way," children's books historian Leonard S. Marcus said
Tuesday. "His children weren't perfect-looking. They didn't
resemble the people seen on advertising or in sitcoms. They looked
more like immigrant children. It was a big change for American
children's books, which tended to take the melting pot approach and
present children who were generic Americans."

Revenge helped inspire "Where the Wild Things Are," his
canonical tale of the boy Max's mind in flight in a forest of
monsters, who just happen to look like some of Sendak's relatives
from childhood. "In The Night Kitchen," released in 1971, was a
forbidden dance of Laurel and Hardy in aprons and the flash of a
boy's genitals, leading to calls for the book to be removed from
library shelves.

"It was so fatuous, so incredible, that people would get so
exercised by a phallus, a normal appendage to a man and to a boy.
It was so cheap and vulgar. Despicable," Sendak said last fall.
"It's all changed now. We live in a different country altogether.
I will not say an improved version. No."

His stories were less about the kids he knew - never had them,
he was happy to say - than the kid he used to be. The son of Polish
immigrants, he was born in 1928 in a Jewish neighborhood in
Brooklyn. The family didn't have a lot of money and he didn't have
a lot of friends besides his brother and sister. He was an outsider
at birth, as Christians nearby would remind him, throwing dirt and
rocks as he left Hebrew school. The kidnapping and murder of
Charles Lindbergh's baby son terrified him for years.

He remembered no special talent - his brother, Jack, was the
chosen one. But he absorbed his father's stories and he loved to
dream and to create, like the time he and his brother built a model
of the 1939 World's Fair out of clay and wax. At the movies, he
surrendered to the magic of "Fantasia," and later escaped into
"Pinocchio," a guilty pleasure during darkened times. The Nazi
cancer was spreading overseas and the U.S. entered the war.
Sendak's brother joined the military, relatives overseas were
captured and killed. Storytelling, after the Holocaust, became
something more than play.

"It forced me to take children to a level that I thought was
more honest than most people did," he said. "Because if life is
so critical, if Anne Frank could die, if my friend could die,
children were as vulnerable as adults, and that gave me a secret
purpose to my work, to make them live. Because I wanted to live. I
wanted to grow up."

Sendak didn't go to college and worked a variety of odd jobs
until he was hired by the famous toy store FAO Schwarz as a window
dresser in 1948. But illustration was his dream and his break came
in 1951 when he was commissioned to do the art for "Wonderful
Farm" by Marcel Ayme. By 1957 he was writing his own books.

"He began to be honest in the `50s," said "Wicked" author
Gregory Maguire, one of Sendak's closest friends. "He was
laceratingly honest at a time when few others were."

Claiming Emily Dickinson, Mozart and Herman Melville as
inspirations, he worked for decades out of the studio of his
shingled 18th century house in Ridgefield, Conn., a country home
reachable only by a bumpy road that seemed designed to shield him
from his adoring public. The interior was a wonderland of carvings
and cushions, from Disney characters to the fanged beasts from his
books to a statuette of Obama.

Sendak spoke often, endlessly, about death in recent years -
dreading it, longing for it. He didn't mind being old because the
young were under so much pressure. But he missed his late siblings
and his longtime companion, Eugene Glynn, who died in 2009. Work,
not people, was his reason to carry on.

"I want to be alone and work until the day my head hits the
drawing table and I'm dead. Kaput," he said last fall.
"Everything is over. Everything that I called living is over. I'm
very, very much alone. I don't believe in heaven or hell or any of
those things. I feel very much like I want to be with my brother
and sister again. They're nowhere. I know they're nowhere and they
don't exist, but if nowhere means that's where they are, that's
where I want to be."

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