A posthumous picture book, “My Brother’s Book” — a poem written and illustrated by Mr. Sendak and inspired by his love for his late brother, Jack — is scheduled to be published next February. 
 
 Mr. Sendak’s work was the subject of critical studies and major exhibitions; in the second half of his career, he was also renowned as a designer of theatrical sets. His art graced the writing of other eminent authors for children and adults, including Hans Christian Andersen , Leo Tolstoy , Herman Melville , William Blake and Isaac Bashevis Singer . 
 
 In book after book, Mr. Sendak upended the staid, centuries-old tradition of American children’s literature, in which young heroes and heroines were typically well scrubbed and even better behaved; nothing really bad ever happened for very long; and everything was tied up at the end in a neat, moralistic bow. 
 
 Headstrong and Bossy 
 
 Mr. Sendak’s characters, by contrast, are headstrong, bossy, even obnoxious. (In “Pierre,” “I don’t care!” is the response of the small eponymous hero to absolutely everything.) His pictures are often unsettling. His plots are fraught with rupture: children are kidnapped, parents disappear, a dog lights out from her comfortable home. 
 
 A largely self-taught illustrator, Mr. Sendak was at his finest a shtetl Blake, portraying a luminous world, at once lovely and dreadful, suspended between wakefulness and dreaming. In so doing, he was able to convey both the propulsive abandon and the pervasive melancholy of children’s interior lives. 
 
 His visual style could range from intricately crosshatched scenes that recalled 19th-century prints to airy watercolors reminiscent of Chagall to bold, bulbous figures inspired by the comic books he loved all his life, with outsize feet that the page could scarcely contain. He never did learn to draw feet, he often said. 
 
 In 1964, the American Library Association awarded Mr. Sendak the Caldecott Medal, considered the Pulitzer Prize of children’s book illustration, for “Where the Wild Things Are.” In simple, incantatory language, the book told the story of Max, a naughty boy who rages at his mother and is sent to his room without supper. A pocket Odysseus, Max promptly sets sail: 
 
 And he sailed off through night and day 
 
 and in and out of weeks 
 
 and almost over a year 
 
 to where the wild things are. 
 
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 There, Max leads the creatures in a frenzied rumpus before sailing home, anger spent, to find his supper waiting. 
 
 As portrayed by Mr. Sendak, the wild things are deliciously grotesque: huge, snaggletoothed, exquisitely hirsute and glowering maniacally. He always maintained he was drawing his relatives — who, in his memory at least, had hovered like a pack of middle-aged gargoyles above the childhood sickbed to which he was often confined. 
 
 Maurice Bernard Sendak was born in Brooklyn on June 10, 1928; his father, Philip, worked in the garment district of Manhattan . Family photographs show the infant Maurice, or Murray as he was then known, as a plump, round-faced, slanting-eyed, droopy-lidded, arching-browed creature — looking, in other words, exactly like a baby in a Maurice Sendak illustration. Mr. Sendak adored drawing babies, in all their fleshy petulance. 
 
 A frail child beset by a seemingly endless parade of illnesses, Mr. Sendak was reared, he said afterward, in a world of looming terrors: the Depression; World War II ; the Holocaust, in which many of his European relatives perished; the seemingly infinite vulnerability of children to danger. He experienced the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby in 1932 as a personal torment: if that fair-haired, blue-eyed princeling could not be kept safe, what certain peril lay in store for him, little Murray Sendak, in his humble apartment in Bensonhurst? 
 
 An image from the Lindbergh crime scene — a ladder leaning against the side of a house — would find its way into “Outside Over There,” in which a baby is carried off by goblins. 
 
 As Mr. Sendak grew up — lower class, Jewish, gay — he felt permanently shunted to the margins of things. “All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy,” he told The New York Times in a 2008 interview. “They never, never, never knew.” 
 
 His lifelong melancholia showed in his work, in picture books like “We Are All in the Dumps With Jack and Guy” (1993), a parable about homeless children in the age of AIDS . It showed in his habits. He could be dyspeptic and solitary, working in his white clapboard home deep in the Connecticut countryside with only Mozart , Melville, Mickey Mouse and his dogs for company. 
 
 It showed in his everyday interactions with people, especially those blind to the seriousness of his enterprise. “A woman came up to me the other day and said, ‘You’re the kiddie-book man!’ ” Mr. Sendak told Vanity Fair last year.“I wanted to kill her.” 
 
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 But Mr. Sendak could also be warm and forthright, if not quite gregarious. He was a man of many enthusiasms — for music , art, literature, argument and the essential rightness of children’s perceptions of the world around them. He was also a mentor to a generation of younger writers and illustrators for children, several of whom, including Arthur Yorinks, Richard Egielski and Paul O. Zelinsky, went on to prominent careers of their own. 
 
 Long Hours in Bed 
 
 As far back as he could remember, Mr. Sendak had loved to draw. That and looking out the window had helped him pass the long hours in bed. While he was still in high school — at Lafayette in Brooklyn — he worked part time for All-American Comics, filling in backgrounds for book versions of the “Mutt and Jeff” comic strip. His first professional illustrations were for a physics textbook, “Atomics for the Millions,” published in 1947. 
 
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 In 1948, at 20, he took a job building window displays for F. A. O. Schwarz. Through the store’s children’s book buyer, he was introduced to Ursula Nordstrom , the distinguished editor of children’s books at Harper & Row. The meeting, the start of a long, fruitful collaboration, led to Mr. Sendak’s first children’s book commission: illustrating “The Wonderful Farm,” by Marcel Aymé, published in 1951. 
 
 Under Ms. Nordstrom’s guidance, Mr. Sendak went on to illustrate books by other well-known children’s authors, including several by Ruth Krauss, notably “A Hole Is to Dig” (1952), and Else Holmelund Minarik’s “Little Bear” series. The first title he wrote and illustrated himself, “Kenny’s Window,” published in 1956, was a moody, dreamlike story about a lonely boy’s inner life. 
 
 Mr. Sendak’s books were often a window on his own experience. “Higglety Pigglety Pop! Or, There Must Be More to Life” was a valentine to Jennie, his beloved Sealyham terrier, who died shortly before the book was published. 
 
 At the start of the story, Jennie, who has everything a dog could want — including “a round pillow upstairs and a square pillow downstairs” — packs her bags and sets off on her own, pining for adventure. She finds it on the stage of the World Mother Goose Theatre, where she becomes a leading lady. Every day, and twice on Saturdays, Jennie, who looks rather like a mop herself, eats a mop made out of salami. This makes her very happy. 
 
 “Hello,” Jennie writes in a satisfyingly articulate letter to her master. “As you probably noticed, I went away forever. I am very experienced now and very famous. I am even a star. ... I get plenty to drink too, so don’t worry.” 
 
 By contrast, the huge, flat, brightly colored illustrations of “In the Night Kitchen,” the story of a boy’s journey through a fantastic nocturnal cityscape, are a tribute to the New York of Mr. Sendak’s childhood, recalling the 1930s films and comic books he adored all his life. (The three bakers who toil in the night kitchen are the spit and image of Oliver Hardy .) 
 
 Mr. Sendak’s later books could be much darker. “Brundibar” (2003), with text by the playwright Tony Kushner , is a picture book based on an opera performed by the children of the Theresienstadt concentration camp. The opera, also called “Brundibar,” had been composed in 1938 by Hans Krasa, a Czech Jew who later died in Auschwitz. 
 
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 ‘Melodramatic Menace’ 
 
 Reviewing the book in The New York Times Book Review, the novelist and children’s book author Gregory Maguire called it “a capering picture book crammed with melodramatic menace and comedy both low and grand.” He added: “In a career that spans 50 years and counting, as Sendak’s does, there are bound to be lesser works. ‘Brundibar’ is not lesser than anything.” 
 
 With Mr. Kushner, Mr. Sendak collaborated on a stage version of the opera, performed in 2006 at the New Victory Theater in New York. 
 
 Despite its wild popularity, Mr. Sendak’s work was not always well received. Some early reviews of “Where the Wild Things Are” expressed puzzlement and outright unease. Writing in Ladies’ Home Journal, the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim took Mr. Sendak to task for punishing Max: 
 
 “The basic anxiety of the child is desertion,” Mr. Bettelheim wrote. “To be sent to bed alone is one desertion, and without food is the second desertion.” (Mr. Bettelheim admitted that he had not actually read the book.) 
 
 “In the Night Kitchen,” which depicts its young hero, Mickey, in the nude, prompted many school librarians to bowdlerize the book by drawing a diaper over Mickey’s nether region. 
 
 But these were minority responses. Mr. Sendak’s other awards include the Hans Christian Andersen Award for Illustration, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award and, in 1996, the National Medal of the Arts, presented by President Bill Clinton . Twenty-two of his titles have been named New York Times best illustrated books of the year. 
 
 Many of Mr. Sendak’s books had second lives on stage and screen. Among the most notable adaptations are the operas “Where the Wild Things Are” and “Higglety Pigglety Pop!” by the British composer Oliver Knussen, and Carole King ’s “Really Rosie,” a musical version of “The Sign on Rosie’s Door,” which appeared on television as an animated special in 1975 and on the Off Broadway stage in 1980. 
 
 In 2009, a feature film version of “Where the Wild Things Are” — part live action, part animated — by the director Spike Jonze opened to favorable notices. (With Lance Bangs, Mr. Jonze also directed “Tell Them Anything You Want,” a documentary film about Mr. Sendak first broadcast on HBO that year.) 
 
 In the 1970s, Mr. Sendak began designing sets and costumes for adaptations of his own work and, eventually, the work of others. His first venture was Mr. Knussen’s “Wild Things,” for which Mr. Sendak also wrote the libretto. Performed in a scaled-down version in Brussels in 1980, the opera had its full premiere four years later, to great acclaim, staged in London by the Glyndebourne Touring Opera. 
 
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 With the theater director Frank Corsaro, he also created sets for several venerable operas, among them Mozart’s “Magic Flute,” performed by the Houston Grand Opera in 1980, and Leos Janacek ’s “Cunning Little Vixen” for the New York City Opera in 1981. 
 
 For the Pacific Northwest Ballet, Mr. Sendak designed sets and costumes for a 1983 production of Tchaikovsky ’s “Nutcracker” ; a film version was released in 1986. 
 
 Among Mr. Sendak’s recent books is his only pop-up book, “Mommy?,” published by Scholastic in 2006, with a scenario by Mr. Yorinks and paper engineering by Matthew Reinhart. 
 
 Mr. Sendak’s companion of a half-century, Eugene Glynn, a psychiatrist who specialized in the treatment of young people, died in 2007. Mr. Sendak’s personal assistant, Lynn Caponera, worked for him almost as long while living at his Ridgefield home. No immediate family members survive. Though he understood children deeply, Mr. Sendak by no means valorized them unconditionally. “Dear Mr. Sun Deck ...” he could drone with affected boredom, imitating the semiliterate forced-march school letter-writing projects of which he was the frequent, if dubious, beneficiary. 
 
 But he cherished the letters that individual children sent him unbidden, which burst with the sparks that his work had ignited. 
 
 “Dear Mr. Sendak,” read one, from an 8-year-old boy. “How much does it cost to get to where the wild things are? If it is not expensive, my sister and I would like to spend the summer there.” 

 Eighty-three is not a bad age at which to pass away, and while I feel regret at how the world is made less by his absence, my real sense of sadness after hearing the news of Sendak's death came from the memories welling up of reading his works to my children. 
 
 My kids are too big now to fit alongside their father in the easy chair in which we conducted our pre-bedtime reading rituals. The easy chair itself has departed. Now we crack jokes while watching "Community" from the living room couch, their long arms and legs spread akimbo in every direction. Sure, we made a point of seeing the movie together, and agreed it was faithful to the original spirit, but it only served to evoke the spirit of those readings; it did not duplicate the experience. 
 
 In mere months, one child will be off to college, while the other increasingly exchanges incomprehensible YouTube in-jokes with his peers. Meanwhile, "Where the Wild Things Are" gathers dust on the bookshelf, safe from the culling that sent so many lesser works to the library or Goodwill (so long, "Magic Schoolbus"! Adios, Berenstein Bears!), but still a relic now of a childhood gone. 
 
 On Facebook, a friend of my sister's recalled that when her mother read "Where the Wild Things Are" she would always sing the tequila song during the wild rumpus scene, "and I argued with her every time that this was not actually in the book." 

 Maurice Sendak's closest friends gathered in his hospital room _ playwright Tony Kushner, authors Brian Selznick and Gregory Maguire. Kushner brought jellybeans, while Maguire placed a picture of Lewis Carroll on the table beside Sendak's bed. 
 
 In this book cover image released by HarperCollins, children's book "Outside Over There," by Maurice Sendak, is shown. Sendak, author and illustrator of popular children's books died, Tuesday, May 8,... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this Jan. 20, 2005 photo released by Syracuse University in Florence, central Italy, Thursday Jan. 20, 2005, shows a moment of the Fantasy Opera in one act and nine scenes, "Where The Wild Things... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this Sept. 6 2011 file photo, children's book author Maurice Sendak is photographed doing an interview at his home in Ridgefield, Conn. Sendak, author of the popular children's book "Where... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this October 1988 file photo, author Maurice Sendak, creator of the best-selling children's book "Where the Wild Things Are," checks proofs of art for a major advertising campaign in his Ridgefield,... (Associated Press) 
 
 In this book cover image released by HarperCollins, children's book "In the Night Kitchen," by Maurice Sendak, is shown. Sendak, author and illustrator of popular children's books died, Tuesday, May 8,... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this Sept. 6 2011 file photo, children's book author Maurice Sendak is photographed doing an interview at his home in Ridgefield, Conn. Sendak, author of the popular children's book "Where... (Associated Press) 
 
 In this book cover image released by HarperCollins, children's book "Bumble Ardy," by Maurice Sendak, is shown. Sendak, author and illustrator of popular children's books died, Tuesday, May 8, 2012 at... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this July 26, 1990 file photo, artist Maurice Sendak signs his individual prints from "The Mother Goose Collection," in New York. Sendak, author of the popular children's book "Where the Wild... (Associated Press) 
 
 This image provided by HarperCollins shows the book cover of "Where the Wild Things Are," by Maurice Sendak. Sendak died Tuesday, May 8, 2012 at Danbury Hospital in Danbury, Conn. He was 83. (AP Photo/HarperCollins) (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this June 16, 1981 file photo, author and illustrator Maurice Sendak, poses in New York. Sendak, author of the popular children's book "Where the Wild Things Are," died, Tuesday, May 8, 2012... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this Sept. 25, 1985 file photo, author Maurice Sendak poses with one of the characters from his book "Where the Wild Things Are," designed for the operatic adaptation of his book in St. Paul,... (Associated Press) 
 
 "The one thing he wasn't uncertain about was his significance," Maguire said Tuesday, hours after Sendak died at age 83. A scowling monument of 20th century children's literature, Sendak had suffered a stroke late last week and spent his remaining days hospitalized in Danbury, Conn. 
 
 "He always identified with his heroes from the past and felt like they spoke to him and encouraged him to do brilliant work. So I thought I would give Maurice a glimpse of the people waiting for him on the other side." 
 
 Sendak, among the most honored and adored children's authors, ranks with Dr. Seuss as a revolutionary force of the past half-century. He told stories about children that were actually about children, and not what adults wished them to be. He inspired every author, from Judy Blume to Daniel Handler, who ever wanted to go a little too far. 
 
 "It's almost impossible to overstate his importance," says Handler, known for the Lemony Snicket "Series Of Unfortunate Events" books. "He's a North Star in the firmament of anyone who makes children's books, in particular for his dark and clear-eyed view of the world that was kindred to me when I was in kindergarten and kindred to me now. He gives neither the comfort nor the horror of sentimentality." 
 
 Censors complained (although not as often as Sendak alleged), but millions of families have made a place _ or even a whole shelf _ in their homes for "Where the Wild Things Are," "In the Night Kitchen" and other works. To have childhood memories of reading often means to have a story to tell about Sendak. 
 
 Maguire, 57, said his family couldn't afford many books, but he recalled his father buying "The Nutshell Library," four pocket-sized hardcovers that included "Pierre" and "Chicken Soup With Rice." 
 
 "We read them to shreds, until they were just bits of tissue paper lying around the room because we couldn't get enough of them," says Maguire, author of four "Wicked" novels and of "Making Mischief: A Maurice Sendak Appreciation." 
 
 Chris Raschka, a two-time recipient of the Caldecott Medal for best illustration in a children's book, remembers reading "Where the Wild Things Are," winner of the Caldecott in 1964. Raschka, 53, was sitting on the kitchen table at his best friend's house and picked up a copy lying nearby. He felt as if he were "peeking into an illicit world." 
 
 "What set it apart was that it seemed like the first picture book that was very personal, and it was painted by an artist who combined the child and the adult in a new way," says Raschka, who works with Sendak's longtime editor, Michael di Capua. 
 
 "Maurice Sendak is really the illustrator's illustrator. He's a stronger presence than anyone else, certainly than any living illustrator. He just represented a very personal, fine art approach to making books that is an inspiration to all of us." 
 
 Handler, 42, says Sendak has been so much a part of his life he can't think of a time he wasn't aware of him. Sendak's books were all over his room and in his home today. To even attempt praise of "Where the Wild Things Are" is like saying "Hamlet" is a good play, he notes. Sendak's genius is how he weaves together the real and the magical without telling you which is which. 
 
 "`Where the Wild Things Are' starts with a boy being sent to his room and proceeds to take him to an enormous and irrational world without really telling us if it's real. But if you're a small child it does seem real and that's what matters," Handler says. 
 
 "Both my son and my wife cried this morning at the news of his death. That might sum up his career in a nutshell."
– A sample of the tributes to Where the Wild Things Are author Maurice Sendak, who died today at 83: Andrew Leonard, Salon: Parents who loved Sendak's books as kids (like Leonard) read them to their own kids with even greater zeal. Thus, "Sendak planted an immortal virus in the culture, a self-fulfilling prophecy of rumpus, an affirmation that the child’s-eye view of the world made total sense. I thank him dearly for it." Peter Dobrin, Philadelphia Inquirer: "In both his portrayal of the terrors of being a child and the deep flaws of adults, Mr. Sendak was a throwback to an earlier era in children's literature, when 19th century books like like Heinrich Hoffmann's Der Struwwelpeter lacked the sweetness and justice of a well-ordered world. " Margalit Fox, New York Times: He "wrenched the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery and plunged it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche ..." Daniel Handler, Lemony Snickets author, to AP: "It's almost impossible to overstate his importance. He's a North Star in the firmament of anyone who makes children's books, in particular for his dark and clear-eyed view of the world that was kindred to me when I was in kindergarten and kindred to me now. He gives neither the comfort nor the horror of sentimentality."