{"id":1074,"date":"2009-10-11T10:47:00","date_gmt":"2009-10-11T17:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2009\/10\/maurice-sendak-and-where-the-wild-things-are.html"},"modified":"2009-10-11T10:47:00","modified_gmt":"2009-10-11T17:47:00","slug":"maurice-sendak-and-where-the-wild-things-are","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2009\/10\/maurice-sendak-and-where-the-wild-things-are.html","title":{"rendered":"Maurice Sendak and "Where the Wild Things Are""},"content":{"rendered":"

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ONE of the fascinating things about literature — especially popular literature — is the way it tracks the contours of the society that produces it. which is a fancy way of saying, maurice sendak books like “where the wild things are” not only reflected those churnings in american culture in the late 50s\/early 60s, it helped produce what we learned to call “the 60s.”<\/p>\n

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sendak, of course, is in the news because of friday’s opening of the long-awaited spike jonze-helmed “where the wild things are” film. HERE<\/a> is my story from today’s LATimes, where i try to set sendak and his most famous book in cultural context. i spoke to sendak, jonze, librarian\/ children’s writer susan patron, and historian of children’s lit seth lerer<\/a> for the piece.<\/div>\n
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in the years before “wild things” came out, in 1963, the big kid-lit awards were being won by books of nursery rhymes and american patriots. robert mccloskey and e.b. white had published wonderful book in the protestant-pastoral tradition. (dr. seuss, of course, had hit his stride, though, i’m told, wasnt taken very seriously by the field’s gatekeepers.)<\/div>\n
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something i wish i’d had room to get into the piece: as lerer points out, the 20th century was the first in which children typically had rooms of their own — dickens grew up with several other kids in the bedroom with him. this allowed kids to develop their own private imaginations, but also generated anxieties — will the room be here when i wake up? are there monsters in here with me? — that sendak’s “wild things” was one of the first to address so eloquently.<\/div>\n
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i will post at least one more “wild things” related piece as we build up to the film’s release.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ONE of the fascinating things about literature — especially popular literature — is the way it tracks the contours of the society that produces it. which is a fancy way of saying, maurice sendak books like “where the wild things are” not only reflected those churnings in american culture in the late 50s\/early 60s, it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[442,145,163,35,76,445,142,143,446,443,444],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1074","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-where-the-wild-things-are","7":"category-50s","8":"category-60s","9":"category-books","10":"category-film","11":"category-jewish-culture","12":"category-kid-lit","13":"category-maurice-sendak","14":"category-seth-lerer","15":"category-spike-jonze","16":"category-susan-patron","17":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1074","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1074"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1074\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}