Here’s Tony Kushner on Maurice Sendak as an artist who creates his own fairy tales by taking the raw material of psychic experience and translating it into images and words.
“What I think is great about Maurice is that people who he borrows from are fairly adult artists — William Blake, Herman Melville, William Shakespeare, John Keats, his pantheon of heroes. Mozart, who meant everything to him, and opera in general Maurice really loved — Verdi was a figure that haunted Maurice a lot. … He really wanted to do with this book what he felt Verdi had done at the end of his life with Falstaff. … In his early 80s, Verdi broke a long silence and composed one of the great comic operas, and Maurice was hoping that this book,My Brother’s Book, would be sort of his farewell masterpiece. But I think that the borrowing from these people, his indebtedness to adult artists, is recognizable. He doesn’t really borrow from fairy tales as much as generate his fairy tales from the same sources. His psyche was really an open book.”
http://www.npr.org/2013/02/04/170757799/sendaks-brothers-book-an-elegy-a-farewell
And more in Vanity Fair on Sendak “hiding” in children’s literature and engaging in guerilla warfare.
http://www.npr.org/2013/02/04/170757799/sendaks-brothers-book-an-elegy-a-farewell
Thanks so much for these articles-like so many, I loved Maurice Sendak both for his words and his art. The “darker” landscapes of children’s literature were a refuge throughout childhood- place of mystery and magic where I felt at home. In retrospect, I see that dangerous “other land” was less scary than my real childhood home. In those strange lands. which included a touch of the macabre and grusome, I believed lived folk who would see and recognize me for myself – a little odd, alittle (gar)goylish, happy to share a joke with a demon or gnome.