[3][4][5] Maurice said that his childhood was a "terrible situation" due to the death of members of his extended family during the Holocaust which introduced him at a young age to the concept of mortality.

[citation needed] One of Sendak's first professional commissions, when he was 20 years old,[8] was creating window displays for the toy store FAO Schwarz.

His work appears in eight books by Ruth Krauss including A Hole is to Dig, published in 1952, which brought wide attention to his artwork.

[14] Sendak gained international acclaim after writing and illustrating Where the Wild Things Are, edited by Ursula Nordstrom at Harper & Row.

The librarian who conducted it observed that there was little doubt what would be voted number one and highlighted its designation by one reader as a watershed, "ushering in the modern age of picture books".

[18] His book In the Night Kitchen, originally issued in 1970, has often been subjected to censorship for its drawings of a young boy prancing naked through the story.

[19] In the Night Kitchen regularly appears on the American Library Association's list of "frequently challenged and banned books".

This rescue story includes an illustration of a ladder leaning out of the window of a home, which according to one report, was based on the crime scene in the Lindbergh kidnapping, "which terrified Sendak as a child.

He contributed the opening segment to Simple Gifts, a Christmas collection of six animated shorts shown on PBS in 1977 and later released on VHS in 1993.

Additionally, he designed sets and costumes for many operas and ballets, including the award-winning (1983) Pacific Northwest Ballet production of Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker, Glyndebourne Festival Opera's productions of Prokofiev's The Love for Three Oranges (1982), Ravel's L'enfant et les sortilèges and L'heure espagnole (1987) and Oliver Knussen's adaptation of Sendak's own Higglety Pigglety Pop!

Later in the 1990s, Sendak approached playwright Tony Kushner to write a new English-language version of the Czech composer Hans Krása's Holocaust opera Brundibár which, remarkably, had been performed by children in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

This Klezmer version of Sergei Prokofiev's best-known musical story for children, Peter and the Wolf, featured Maurice Sendak as the narrator.

In 2011, Sendak adapted his Sesame Street short Bumble Ardy into a children's book, his first in over thirty years, and ultimately his last published work before his death.

[1] After his partner's death, Sendak donated $1 million to the Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services in memory of Glynn, who treated young people there.

"[25] In the early 1960s, Sendak lived in a basement apartment at 29 West 9th Street in Greenwich Village where he wrote and illustrated Wild Things.

Not realizing that this was inappropriate for children, young Maurice was frequently sent home after retelling his father's "softcore Bible tales" at school.

"[29] Author Neil Gaiman remarked, "He was unique, grumpy, brilliant, wise, magical and made the world better by creating art in it.

[citation needed] The 2012 season of Pacific Northwest Ballet's The Nutcracker, for which Sendak designed the set and costumes, was dedicated to his memory.

The major retrospective of over 130 pieces pulled from the museum's vast Sendak collection featured original artwork, rare sketches, never-before-seen working materials, and exclusive interview footage.

Exhibition highlights included: Since the items had been on loan to the Rosenbach for decades, many in the museum world expected that the Sendak material would remain there.

The Rosenbach filed an action in 2014, in state probate court in Connecticut, contending that the estate had kept many rare books that Sendak had pledged to the library in his will.

In a ruling in Connecticut probate court, a judge awarded the bulk of the disputed book collection to the Sendak estate, not to the museum.

Under an agreement with, and supported by a grant from, the Foundation, Sendak's original artwork, sketches, books, and other materials (totaling close to 10,000 items) will be housed at UConn's Archives and Special Collections in the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center.

[32] Internationally, Sendak received the third biennial Hans Christian Andersen Award for Illustration in 1970, recognizing his "lasting contribution to children's literature".

[33][34] He received one of two inaugural Astrid Lindgren Memorial Awards in 2003, recognizing his career contribution to "children's and young adult literature in the broadest sense".

On June 10, 2013, Google featured an interactive doodle where visitors could click on the video go triangle to see an animated movie-ette of Max and Sendak's other main characters.

[43] On the cusp of the 125th anniversary of the Brooklyn Public Library it was revealed on November 16, 2022 that the most checked-out book in the collection was Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are.