Where the Wild Things Are

Maurice Sendak

With just 338 words and the irresistible invitation —’Let the wild rumpus start’ — this beloved picture book transports us to a magical world where walls turn into forests, monsters dance around a fire, and a little boy can become king.

Max is a classic antihero: He’s frustrated, lashes out in anger, and can’t understand why he can’t just do what he wants to do. And yet, we can’t help but want to give him a big hug. Dressed in his wolf costume, chasing the dog, and sent to bed without supper, he’s in a sorry state. But soon, his room has transformed into a jungle, and he sails across an ocean to an island ruled by beasts — where eye-rolling and teeth-gnashing abound. Max revels in his new-found freedom and feral friends, but eventually, he realizes that home is where he belongs.

Maurice Sendak wrote this timeless story in 1963, and the following year, it was awarded the Caldecott Medal for ‘most distinguished American picture book for children.’ It’s been adapted into an animated short, a children’s opera, and a live-action film. To date, it’s sold 19 million copies worldwide. Not bad for a book that was never intended to be about monsters at all.

Sendak planned the original story to be about a boy who escapes to a land of wild horses, but then realized he didn’t know how to draw a horse. His editor — inspired by the Yiddish expression vilde chaya (wild animals) — suggested ‘wild things,’ so Sendak replaced the horses with drawings of exaggerated characters, based on his relatives. Every week, Sendak’s family would gather for Sunday lunch in Brooklyn, where his aunts and uncles would pinch his cheeks and tell him he ‘looked so good we could eat you up.’ He described them as having crazy faces and wild eyes, the very characteristics that make the monsters in his book so distinctive (and so cute). When Sendak wrote the opera in 1983, he finally named the monsters: Tzippy, Moishe, Aaron, Emile, and Bernard, in honor of those cheek-pinching aunts and uncles.

The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another, his mother called him ‘WILD THING!’ and Max said, ‘I’LL EAT YOU UP!’ so he was sent to bed without eating anything. — Maurice Sendak

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