During one illness Maurice had as a toddler, his mother found him clawing a photo of his grandfather that hung above the bed; he was speaking Yiddish, even though he only knew English. She thought a dybbuk was trying to claim him from beyond the grave, so she tore up the photograph. She said she burned it, but years later Maurice found the torn-up pieces in a Ziploc bag among her possessions. He had a restorer put it back together and he kept it in his house, this grandfather calling him to the grave.

The general message from his family seemed to be that he should be grateful to be alive, that his continued existence involved some aspect of luck that should not, if he was smart, be pushed. When he was very small, his parents told him that when his mother was pregnant they went to the pharmacy and bought all kinds of toxic substances to induce a miscarriage, and his father tried pushing her off a ladder. They hadn’t wanted a third child. Why would they tell a tiny child this? As a famous artist, later in life, he brushed the question off in an interview, as though it wasn’t in fact a big deal—they were harried immigrants, they didn’t need another mouth to feed, though surely something deeper was etched into his sense of himself. He was unwanted, unwelcome, somehow meant to die, meant to be carried off. He said once, “I felt certain my mother did not like me.”

There is a formal photograph of his dumpling-shaped mother, her wavy hair chin length, with her three wary children, the wariest of all being baby Maurice, who is dressed in a white bonnet and appears from his scowl to already be seeing some pretty wild things. She is looking at the camera as if it might at any moment leap out and attack her. Theirs was not a happy or relaxing home. Sadie Sendak was often furious. She had trouble with warmth. The siblings turned to one another, sometimes sleeping together like kittens, three in a bed. Maurice, who struggled in public interviews to be generous to his mother, said that she should never have had children, and distant, absent, prickly, punishing mothers would be a big obsession of his books.

The literary critic Stephen Greenblatt once wrote about Sendak’s books: “Love often takes the form of menace, and safe havens are reached, if they are reached at all, only after terrifying adventures.”

All his life Maurice bristled at the idea of childhood innocence and at those who thought his books were offending or challenging it. In a comic Art Spiegelman did in The New Yorker of a conversation they had in the woods, Maurice says: “People say, ‘Oh, Mr. Sendak. I wish I were in touch with my childhood self, like you!’ As if it were all quaint and succulent, like Peter Pan. Childhood is cannibals and psychotics vomiting in your mouth! ... In reality, childhood is deep and rich ... I remember my own childhood vividly … I knew terrible things ... but I knew I mustn’t let adults know I knew ... it would scare them.”