[W]hen I was a kid, “Where the Wild Things Are” was something to be reckoned with, like the mumps. I was 4 when it was published in 1963. I was cognizant that teachers and librarians thought it was a “good” book, proved by the shiny Caldecott Medal on its cover. (A budding critic, I had a premature and probably unhealthy interest in consensus.) I don’t think my family had a copy, but I remember seeing it in what I now realize were the more cosmopolitan homes on my Northern California cul-de-sac — the book resides in my possibly ­exaggerated-for-effect memory as an early ’60s progressive totem alongside Danish modern furniture, African art and the sticky, stale-sweet smell of pipe tobacco. I was certainly aware of “Where the Wild Things Are” as something I should like, the way I have more recently felt I ought to like Tom Waits and “30 Rock.”

But once I finally got it — a convert! — I was eager to read “Where the Wild Things Are” to my own kids. Yet neither Isaac, as you know, nor his older sister, Zoe, much cared for it. I read it to them once or twice; they shrugged; the book got permanently shelved while the bindings cracked on “Go, Dog. Go!” and “The Rainbow Fish.” I’ve wondered if another reason I didn’t properly love “Where the Wild Things Are” as a kid was that anger hadn’t been freely expressed in my button-down home; perhaps I had found Sendak’s parable less liberating than off-putting or even frightening. (The latter was a common concern when the book was first published.) Conversely, yelling at one another is almost a hobby in my present home, so maybe that’s why my own kids found the book — this is all I could get out of them — “boring.” Perhaps they agreed with Publishers Weekly, which, back in 1963, dismissed Sendak’s story as “pointless and confusing.”

Obviously, many millions of children have loved “Where the Wild Things Are” — there are more than 19 million copies in print around the world — but I was struck, while conducting an extremely informal survey of a couple of dozen friends and a few professionals in the field of children’s literature, by how many said Sendak’s work had eluded their younger selves and/or their own offspring. Which kids’ books, I had wanted to know, are appreciated more in theory, or by adults, than by actual kids? I never heard a knock against Beverly Cleary and only one against Dr. Seuss. But probably half my sample group had shrugged at “Where the Wild Things Are.” “Impenetrable,” one educator and critic said. In her view, while the book was written from a child’s perspective, it had the processed feel of “something arrived at years later as a construct to understand the writer’s own anger.” Actually, I think that’s what I now like about the book, that sense of self-aware struggle — and whiff of psychoanalysis. Sendak hinted at this in a 1966 interview with the New Yorker: “It’s only after the act of writing the book that, as an adult, I can see what has happened, and talk about fantasy as catharsis, about Max acting out his anger as he fights to grow. . . . For me, the book was a personal exorcism. It went deeper into my own childhood than anything I’ve done before.”
    -ESSAY: Where the Wild Things Weren’t (BRUCE HANDY, October 8, 2009 , NY Times)