Author Maurice Sendak Dies At 83

Ridgefield's famed children's book author and illustrator Maurice Sendak died Tuesday.

The celebrated children's author, best known for his book "Where The Wild Things Are," was "widely considered the most important children’s book artist of the 20th century," the New York Times reports.

The Times reports that Mr. Sendak died of complications from a recent stroke, according to his longtime editor, Michael di Capua.

"Where The Wild Things Are" was published in 1963, and the story of a little boy named Max who sails into his dreams to have a "wild rumpus" with imaginative, sometimes nightmarish monsters was a bestseller.

Mr. Sendak wrote and illustrated more than a dozen solo picture books and over 80 books in all — one more posthumous piece, "My Brother's Book," is due out in February.

The Times described his work: "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."

Recently, Maurice Sendak sat down with Stephen Colbert for an interview in his Ridgefield home.