<p>For a guy who admitted that he didn’t like kids much, his books sure brought joy to many.</p>
<p>The Steven Colbert recent interview with Maurice Sendak was fabulous. Really highlighted Sendak’s crotchety wit brilliantly.</p>
<p>I loved him… heard Fresh Air, this morning, where Terry Gross compiled the best of her 3-4 interviews with him over the years. The last interview, last autumn, was absolutely heartbreaking, but so life affirming, really worth a listen. I’ll have to find the Colbert interview.</p>
<p>I just posted a link to the NYTimes obit on my Facebook page. In the early 80s, when I was a young book publicist, I had the wonderful experience of working with Sendak to publicize his book, Outside Over There. He was a lovely, gentle man, with an incredible sense of magic and imagination – and also dogged by a kind of melancholia that he carried his entire life…</p>
<p>Orchestramom, what wonderful memories. He talked about the melancholia with Terry Gross. Both his mother and father were Polish Jews who came to America way before the war. Almost every single one of his relatives died in the Holocaust when he was young, and he said that it has been the palette that colored the rest of his life. His book Bumble-Ardy, is about him dealing with this in his Maurice Sendak way.</p>
<p>He appeared to have a very deep understanding of children. He said he stopped signing books and meeting children because many didn’t connect the old man with THEIR book, and it was terrible to watch parents take the child’s favorite book out of their hands, give it to the old man, and have him write in it, when they have always been told that they shouldn’t write in a book. It was quite a wry and funny story.</p>
<p>I had the wonderful privilege of meeting Maurice and his partner, Gene, through a mutual friend who is a NYC playwright many years ago. We got together several times and he was a delightful, gentle, funny man. Such a talent and such an influence on so many young lives.</p>