Where the Wild Things Are SparkNotes

Where the Wild Things Are Summary

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Where the Wild Things Are (1963) by Maurice Sendak is a children's picture book that follows Max, a young boy dressed in a wolf costume, as he conjures up a wild adventure in his bedroom.

At the beginning of the story, Max is in his wolf costume hammering knotted clothes to the wall and chasing his dog with a fork. As a result, his mom tells him he is a "wild thing," and Max replies that he will eat her up. She sends him to bed without supper.

In Max's bedroom, a forest begins to grow. At first, just a few trees appear, but soon, his whole room is a forest. Max goes into the woods and finds an ocean where he boards his private sailboat. He sails in and out of weeks and for a year, and then arrives at the land where the Wild Things live. There, the monster-like Things gnash their teeth and roll their eyes in an attempt to scare Max, but Max isn't afraid. He uses a "magic trick" where he stares directly into their eyes, quickly gaining control of them. The Things make him the "King of all Wild Things. He plays with his new Wild Thing crew. Together, they howl at the moon, hang from trees, and Max catches a ride on one Wild Thing's back.

Max then orders the Wild Things to stop and sends them to bed without supper. He smells his dinner from across the ocean and starts to feel lonely. He wants to go back to where "someone loved him best of all."

As he boards his boat to head home, the Wild Things try to get Max to stay. They gnash their teeth and roll their eyes, saying, "We'll eat you up—we love you so!" Max waves goodbye. Max sails in and out of weeks, for a year and arrives back at his room. There, he finds his supper waiting for him, and it is still hot.

A significant theme the book explores is handling one’s emotions. Max is frustrated and angry when his mother sends him to bed, but he escapes into his imagination where he can expend his energy having a “rumpus” with the Wild Things. There, he observes reality from an outside perspective and decides to return to "where he's loved."

Originally an illustrator, Sendak began writing and illustrating his own books in the 1950s. Earlier drafts of Where the Wild Things Are saw Max escaping to a land of wild horses, but Sendak found that drawing horses was too difficult. His editor suggested the "Wild Things" of the current version.

Sendak's Jewish-Polish background shaped many aspects of the book. "Wild Things" comes from a Yiddish term used to describe ornery children: "vilde chaya," or "wild animals." Sendak used caricatures of his relatives, poor Jewish-Polish immigrants, as the faces of the Wild Things. On visits to these relatives as a child, Sendak would retreat into his drawings to get away from the "crazy faces and wild eyes" of the desperate, uneducated immigrants.

Sendak credits his successful career with his dark, unhappy childhood. He recalls in one interview how angry he was at his father for not coming to his bar mitzvah when, unbeknownst to him, his father had just learned that all of his family back in Poland were killed the Holocaust.

Sendak prided himself on never lying to children and in presenting real-world problems, such as homelessness. "Solving the problems of homelessness, or any other social problems isn't the real purpose of this book," he said, "These are difficult times for children. Children have to be brave to survive what the world does to them. And this world is scrungier and rougher and dangerouser than it ever was before."

Despite some initial negative reviews, the book was popular with children. Two years later, the book was revisited, receiving more-favorable reviews. Francis Spufford, for example, called it "One of the very few picture books to make an entirely deliberate and beautiful use of the psychoanalytic story of anger."

In 2007, the book was named one of the Teachers' Top 100 Books for Children by the National Education Association, and in 2012 a survey conducted by NYPL librarian Elizabeth Bird concluded that Where the Wild Things Are was still number one.

Despite refusing to write a sequel to the book, once calling such a thing "the most boring idea imaginable," Sendak did make a connection between the themes of Where the Wild Things Are and two of his other books, In the Night Kitchen and Outside Over There.

There have been several different adaptations of the book, with an animated short directed by Gene Deitch in 1973, an opera composed by Oliver Knussen in the 1980s and a live-action film directed by Spike Jonze in 2009.

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