Maurice Sendak’s Connecticut home was surrounded by elephants when the Observer went to visit in 1984; not a regular thing – the circus was in town – but the perfect start to an encounter with the provocatively playful illustrator and creator of ‘fantastical, unsettling, topsy-turvy worlds’.
Sendak lived alone with his dogs in a house full of Mickey Mouse memorabilia; the rodent’s history was one of his passions. ‘As soon as he married Minnie, he started going downhill. In the early days he was as thin as a rat,’ he said of a 4ft waving model. Another was soap opera. Sendak wanted to watch to the end of All My Children: ‘The series had reached a gripping moment where the heroine had unwittingly married a psychopath.’
