The Wildest Rumpus: Maurice Sendak and the Art of Death

Maurice Sendak had always been obsessed with death. He drew through his obsession, used it. He drew lions that would swallow you; he drew wild things that gnashed their terrible teeth; he drew faceless hooded goblins stealing babies out of a window; he drew fat bakers who’d bake you up in a pie; he drew a 9-year-old pig that promised he would never turn 10. He drew funny, charming, cheerful, haunting near-deaths. He drew narrow escapes, popping up, resurrection.

He knew what it was like to be so depressed that dying did not seem crazy or outlandish or remote. He had a kind of intimacy with death, with the idea of it, anyway.

Even as a tiny child in Brooklyn, Maurice was unusually alert to the prospect of dying. He was floored by every childhood sickness—measles, scarlet fever, double pneumonia. “My parents were not discreet,” he said. “They always thought I was going to die.” He laid out the toy soldiers on the blankets of his sickbed. He watched other children play through the window.

One day his grandmother, who had emigrated from the shtetls outside Warsaw, dressed him in a white suit, white shirt, white tights, white shoes, and took him out to the stoop to sit with her. The idea was that the angel of death would pass over them and think that he was already an angel and there was no need to snatch him from his family.

During one illness Maurice had as a toddler, his mother found him clawing a photo