Sendak and Childhood

May 9, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

All happy childhoods are alike.  Each happy childhood is unhappy in its own way.  Or maybe not.  But just as people differ in how they view their own childhoods, cultures too vary in their dominant image of childhood. 

I’ve posted before (here for example) that in American movies children are often morally superior to adults – wiser, more competent, and more honest.  They are also untainted by the complexities and troubles of the adult world. 

That’s not the way Maurice Sendak saw it.  Those monsters in Where the Wild Things Are were based on his own aunts and uncles. 

In 1993, Art Spiegelman visited Sendak “at his idyllic Connecticut estate” and drew the experience for The New Yorker.

Sendak and Spiegelman both work in the panel format. Both are children of Polish Jews and have family who were killed in the holocaust.  It’s possible that they also share an almost un-American view of childhood. 

(This probably violates the New Yorker copyright, but until they come for me, I’ll leave it up. You can see the full Spiegelman story here.)