Maurice Sendak has died at the age of 83 due to complications from a recent stroke.
There is a wonderful obituary on the New York Times site by Margalit Fox, which includes this lovely description:
A largely self-taught illustrator, Mr. Sendak was at his finest a shtetl Blake, portraying a luminous world, at once lovely and dreadful, suspended between wakefulness and dreaming. In so doing, he was able to convey both the propulsive abandon and the pervasive melancholy of children’s interior lives.
He did have a rather dark vision of the world, yet not without sympathy and understanding. Here’s a quote from Sendak himself, from his Caldecott acceptance speech:
… from their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disruptive emotions… fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives… (and) they continually cope with frustration as best they can.
His was always a refreshing antidote to the unrelenting sunshine and cheer of the majority of children’s books, and – like the traditional fairy tales he drew inspiration from – his works grip the imagination more tenaciously than the floaty bits of fluff that pass for children’s entertainment these days.
Related posts on this blog:
Book reviews…
And…
Oh Maurice, You Old Curmudgeon…
Children’s Authors Who Broke the Rules
Rarest Kind of Best 
Unstructured Play Time! Go for it!
26 Apr 2012 Leave a comment
by Kim in Commentary, Independence, Issues, Parenting
It looks like all I’ve got time for these days is passing on links… Oh well…
Here’s another good one though, “The Genius of Unstructured Summer Time” on the New York Times site. One of the things that irks me most about modern parenting trends is the need for constant curriculum – not just during school hours, but now bleeding into all available free time, early mornings, evenings, weekends, holidays, summer time… (As well as into the very early years of toddlerhood and infancy: witness expanding kindergarten hours, full-curriculum daycares, computer lapware for babies!)
What would unprogrammed time look like? Is it so bad that they might get a little bored? Learning how to entertain themselves might be one of the most useful skills they can develop.
We spend so much time trying to instill the love of reading in our children, but when the heck are they supposed to read for enjoyment when we keep them hopping every hour of the week?
The space and time to just think… that is where true creativity can spring forth. Dare we let them follow their hearts, in their own time and in whatever direction it leads them?