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From a Guardian piece aboutMaurice Sendak:

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To his millions of readers, of course, Sendak will always be young, a proxy for Max in Where the Wild Things Are, who runs away from his mother’s anger into the consoling realm of his own imagination. There are monsters in there, but Max faces them down before returning to his mother for reconciliation and dinner. Sendak’s own exile took rather longer to resolve. The monsters from Wild Things were based on his own relatives. They would visit his house in Brooklyn when he was growing up (“All crazy – crazy faces and wild eyes”) and pinch his cheeks until they were red. Looking back, he sees how desperate they all were, these first-generation immigrants from Poland, with no English, no education and, although they didn’t know it in 1930, a family back home facing extinction in the concentration camps. At the time, all he saw was grotesques.

That included his parents. If he had come from a happy home, says Sendak, he would never have become an artist, at least not the kind of artist he is. Sendak’s picture books acknowledge the terrors of childhood, how vicious and lonely it can be. In his latest book, Bumble-Ardy, the hero is a piglet who loses his neglectful parents to a slicing machine on the first page and is left in the care of an aunt. When Bumble turns nine, she throws him his first ever birthday party and, in the manner of most Sendak stories, things take a dark turn: older pigs gatecrash and, in a kind of porcine burlesque, wreck the place. The pictures are feverish and transporting – and, although the book ends in forgiveness and a hug between aunt and nephew, the sense of precariousness around Bumble remains. “I refuse to lie to children,” says Sendak. “I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence.”

The rest.