Abstract: Maurice Sendak (1928-2012), widely credited for "wrench[ing] the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery and plung[ing] it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche," was perhaps the most emotionally profound and widely beloved children's book artist of the twentieth century. Born a sickly child to Polish Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn, Sendak's work helped revise conceptions of modern American childhood by drawing from his experience of first-generation American acculturation, his alien...
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