Remembering Maurice Sendak - NYTimes.com Maurice Sendak's 1963 "Where the Wild Things Are" unlocked a scary, psychologically nuanced, inner world long taboo in mainstream children's books. Mr. Sendak once told me that King Kong was a great character and had influenced him when he created "Wild Things." You're supposed to be frightened of these things. Kids need Kongs to help them conquer their anxiety," he said. Maybe "Wild Things" is not your particular inspirational tipping point. Mr. Sendak's 1970 "In the Night Kitchen" also spooked a generation of readers. Mickey, the naked 3-year-old protagonist, and the whorl of sexual innuendos that floated around him, were shocking in their day. And, if Mr. Sendak's work, in general, conjured demons, "In the Night Kitchen" kindly presented a way of using imagination to conquer them. The artists and designers here are direct beneficiaries of Mr. Sendak's genius. He revolutionized narrative and conceptual illustration through the way he interpreted his own influences; he drew from the past to illuminate the present. "Night Kitchen," his stylistic homage to the comics artist Winsor McCay (who created "Little Nemo in Slumberland"), is a mash-up of comic strip hilarity, expressionist and surrealist absurdity, and has inspired illustrators to revive passé styles and to use them as foundations for new ones. Mr. Sendak's agility with sly pictorial autobiography encouraged illustrators to inject personal symbolism into otherwise depersonalized commercial art. Mr. Sendak was not the only illustrator to explore these recesses. But he opened a rich vein of possibilities for other artists whom he inspired, and who created their own symbolic visual languages, with which they could tell two or more stories at once - one for the public, the other for the self. "Wild Things" and "Night Kitchen" exemplify Mr. Sendak's skill at bifurcation. He often objected to being called a children's book illustrator, despite his success at it. His heroes were not children's favorites, but rather Mozart and Melville. One of his proudest illustration jobs was Melville's "Pierre: or, the Ambiguities," a truly inspiring suite of 30 drawings that, on the scale of memorable images, is as weighty as his most important books. Probably there's not a child who has ever seen it. STEVE HELLER writes the "Visuals" column for The New York Times Book Review.