Children’s Books from the Margins of Life with Maurice Sendak

At Electric Literature, Michele Kirichanskaya delves into the ways Maurice Sendak’s experiences as a queer, Jewish writer influenced his innovative children’s books. “Rather than patronizing his young readers, painting an illusion of childhood ‘innocence,’ he respected them by acknowledging the terrifying reality of what it meant to be a child,” Kirichanskaya writes, “someone who existed on the margins of life, who possessed both intense vulnerability and incredible insight, unfiltered by adult biases. Sendak, along with literary innovator and legendary editor Ursula Nordstrom, created a book that would become emblematic of the richness and depth of children’s picture books.”