On this episode of Our American Stories, Maurice Sendak had a rare ability to look at childhood without sentimentality. He understood its private fears and its unruly joys, and he tried to give those feelings a place to live on the page. That effort shaped the work that made him, for many, the defining children’s book artist of the twentieth century.

Our own Greg Hengler traces how Sendak’s early life and restless imagination shaped the world that would become Where the Wild Things Are—a story that opened the door to a new kind of children’s literature and revealed just how powerful a picture book could be.

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