Grown-ups desperately need to feel safe, and then they project onto the kids,” he said. “But what none of us seem to realize is how smart kids are. They don’t like what we write for them, what we dish up for them, because it’s vapid, so they’ll go for the hard words, they’ll go for the hard concepts, they’ll go for the stuff where they can learn something, not didactic things, but passionate things.

Maurice Sendak (June 10, 1928-May 8, 2012)

There is a sprawling pantheon of picture books, the writers and illustrators who defined my early childhood, whose work I still collect and love: Jane Yolen, Karla Kuskin, David Small, Nancy Willard, the Provensens, Eric Carle, Chris Van Allsburg and dozens more.

And then, above and beyond, there’s Maurice Sendak.

Sendak’s works were thrilling and terrifying, compelling and defining, because, in his words, he refused to “cater to the bullshit of innocence.” He was one of very few children’s book creators who really got the terrifying unpredictability and momentum of the world as children experience it, in all its grandeur and complexity and inhumanity and terrible, fleeting wonder.

(Source: The New York Times)

Notes

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