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Among the Wild Things (Maurice Sendak), Nat Hentoff (The New Yorker, January 1966)

“As I looked at him, I found that he reminded me of the children in his books, and I told him so. ‘Yes, they’re all a kind of caricature of me,’ he said. ‘They look as if they’d been hit on the head, and hit so hard they weren’t going to grow anymore. When I first started showing my work to children’s book editors, about seventeen years ago, they didn’t encourage me, and a major reason was the kind of children I drew. One editor, I remember, told me they were too European. What she meant was that they seemed ugly to her… It’s not that I don’t see the naturalistic beauty of a child. I’m very aware of that beauty, and I could draw it. I know the proportions of a child’s body. But I am trying to draw the way children feel—or, rather, the way I imagine they feel. It’s the way I know I felt as a child.’”