Gay Author Maurice Sendak Dies At Age 83

Where The Wild Things Are author Maurice Sendak has died at the age of 85.

Roundly praised, intermittently censored and occasionally eaten, Mr. Sendak’s books were essential ingredients of childhood for the generation born after 1960 or thereabouts, and in turn for their children. He was known in particular for more than a dozen picture books he wrote and illustrated himself, most famously “Where the Wild Things Are,” which was simultaneously genre-breaking and career-making when it was published by Harper & Row in 1963.

I don’t think I ever actually read Sendak’s most famed book, but I recall there being a indoor playground and restaurant based on it at San Francisco’s ill-fated Metreon complex.

RELATED: Sendak came out publicly three years ago.

Was there anything he had never been asked? He paused for a few moments and answered, “Well, that I’m gay.” “I just didn’t think it was anybody’s business,” Mr. Sendak added. He lived with Eugene Glynn, a psychoanalyst, for 50 years before Dr. Glynn’s death in May 2007. He never told his parents: “All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy. They never, never, never knew.”