Maurice sendak gay
The following guest blog post is by Golan Moskowitz, a doctoral candidate at Brandeis University, where he received a shared M.A. in Close Eastern and Judaic Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies. Mr. Moskowitz is the 2016 recipient of the Billie M. Levy Commute and Research Grant, an annual study grant awarded to scholars to motivate use of the Northeast Children’s Literature Collection. Mr. Moskowitz is also a visual artist with a B.A. in Art from Vassar College.
Children’s books are grave business. So mind the late Maurice Sendak (1928-2012), who believed that the apparent simplicity of the children’s novel – along with children’s talent for intuition and perception – made it an ideal develop for burying complex messages. Among the most serious of artists to ever write children’s books, Sendak offered messages about how the wider society might neglect or threaten unusual individuals, but also how those individuals might harness fantasy, animal energy, and improvisation to endure and survive. As a recipient of the Billie M. Levy Commute and Research Grant, I had the privilege of studying several of the collections in Archives and Special Collections,
Maurice Sendak (1928-2012)
By Paul Goldfinger, Editor @Blogfinger
Maurice Sendak is considered to be the most key children’s book author in the 20th century. Among his books are “Where the Wild Things Are” (1963) and the more recent “Bumble-Ardy.” He also was a designer who worked on many operas and ballets. Here is a quote where he mentions a fan letter from a child:
“A little young man sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters – sometimes very hastily – but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, ‘Dear Jim: I loved your card.’
Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said: ‘Jim loved your card so much he ate it.’ That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”
Sendak was gay and he lived with his partner for 50 years. He also was an atheist and he often talked about death. He said that his friends who were “believersR
If you missed this publication launch today, please perform check it out!
On-hand was MIT Prof. Marah Gubar (children’s literature scholar extraordinaire), Gregory Maguire (author of Wicked), Brian Selznick (author of The Invention of Hugo Cabret), and of course Golan Moskowitz himself. It’s a pretty big deal to gather such a constellation of luminaries for a book launch, and they did not disappoint.
As readers of the blog already know, Maurice Sendak was – is! – one of the greatest artists for children, and indeed one of the greatest artists, period. Because he came of age at a time when being gay was regarded as shameful (and, indeed, could result in persecution, violence, jail), he kept his sexuality hidden for most of his being – 50 years of which he shared with his partner, Dr. Eugene Glynn. Moskowitz’s Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Homosexual Jewish Context is the first work to gaze at how this key aspect of his persona shaped his artistic sensibility. When I say “hidden,” I should say that people who knew him, knew. But his sexuality wasn’t in any press account of his life until the 2000s. There are two passing references (a s
History
Maurice Sendak (1928-2012), regarded as the 20th century’s most important children’s manual illustrator, was born in Brooklyn to Polish-Jewish immigrants. His ill health as a child and the loss of relatives to the Holocaust impacted his work, with his obituary in the New York Times noting that he “wrenched the picture book out of the trustworthy, sanitized world of the nursery and plunged it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly pretty recesses of the human psyche.” His big break came in the first 1950s, when well-known children’s book editor Ursula Nordstrom, of Harper & Row, hired him to illustrate children’s books after seeing the window displays he created for F.A.O. Schwarz. Nordstrom went on to be his most significant collaborator.
By the mid-1950s, Sendak began writing and illustrating his control books. While living in a duplex apartment (basement and ground floor) at 29 West 9th Street in Greenwich Village, where he moved in 1962, he completed the text and illustrations for his best-selling picture book, Where the Wild Things Are (1963). His family in Brooklyn inspired the story for the book, which earned Sendak the prestigious Caldeco