![]() ![]() Yet, as Maria Tatar points out, Bettelheim shares Sendak’s view that reading stories about childhood anxieties can be potentially therapeutic, a way for children to (in Sendak’s words) tame wild things through fantasy. The combination is the worst desertion that can threaten a child” (48). To be sent to bed alone is one desertion, and without food is the second desertion. ![]() In his infamous 1969 Ladies Home Journal piece, Bruno Bettelheim – who had not then read Where the Wild Things Are (1963) – worried about the book’s effect on “the child.” As he said, “The basic anxiety of the child is desertion. Or What sort of child does the Sendak book expect as its reader? Or, even, What is a child? The Sendak book that got us adults asking these questions is Where the Wild Things Are, published 50 years ago, in October 1963. ![]() Will a Sendak book make children uncomfortable, too? they wonder. Maurice Sendak’s work makes adults uncomfortable, and these adults then consequently worry about how children will feel. After some research, we figured out that its release was in October of that year. It’s 50 years old, having been originally released in Fall 1963. My fellow Niblings ( Betsy Bird, Julie Walker Danielson, Travis Jonker) and I decided a few months ago that it’d be fun to coordinate some blog posts today in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of Where the Wild Things Are. ![]()
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