Available Formats
Paperback
Published: 2nd June 2000
Hardback, Special edition
Published: 1st April 2013
Paperback
Published: 2nd November 2015
Where The Wild Things Are
By (Author) Maurice Sendak
Penguin Random House Children's UK
Red Fox
2nd June 2000
4th May 2000
United Kingdom
Children
Fiction
813.54
Winner of Caldecott Medal 1964
Paperback
48
Width 224mm, Height 252mm, Spine 4mm
240g
Sendak's much-loved favourite, a best-seller and an acknowledged classic of twentieth-century children's picture books. One night Max puts on his wolf suit and makes mischief of one kind and another, so his mother calls him 'Wild Thing' and sends him to bed without his supper. That night a forest begins to grow in Max's room and an ocean rushes by with a boat to take Max to the place where the wild things are. Max tames the wild things and crowns himself as their king, and then the wild rumpus begins! But when Max has sent the monsters to bed, and everything is quiet, he starts to feel lonely and realises it is time to sail home to the place where someone loves him best of all.
Sendak is the daddy of them all when it comes to picture books - the words, the rhythm and the design are all wonderful. * S Magazine, Sunday Express *
The greatest picture book ever written -- Chris Riddell, Children's Laureate * Guardian *
The key to Sendak's success and to the continuing hipness of his book, is that it's hero is not a good child . . . the book is, in fact, extraordinarily childcentric, a book written for and about terrible infants, the kind of terrible infants that most children really are and that all adults remain for much of the time -- David Baddiel * The Times *
This is my never-fail picture book. The text is very short, but utterly perfect, the illustrations are tremendous -- Jacqueline Wilson
Gripping, ingenious and uplifting . . . a shrewd, fierce, healing book -- Boyd Tonkin * Independent *
Maurice Sendak was born in Brooklyn, New York. He began by illustrating other authors' books for children, but the first book that he both wrote and illustrated was Kenny's Window, published in 1956. In his lifetime, he illustrated over 80 books, and received many awards, including the 1964 Caldecott Medal for Where the Wild Things Are. In 1970 he was the first American to win the Hans Christian Andersen Illustrator's Medal. He passed away in May 2012.