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1-Page Summary of Where the Wild Things Are

In the children’s book Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, a young boy named Max is wearing a wolf costume and chasing his dog with a fork. He also damages his room by hammering knotted clothes to the wall. As punishment for his actions, he is sent to bed without supper and told that he is a “wild thing.”

In Max’s room, a forest appears. At first it’s just a few trees, but soon his whole room is filled with them. He goes into the woods and finds an ocean where he boards his private sailboat. He sails in and out of weeks and for a year before arriving at the land where the Wild Things live. There, they try to scare him by gnashing their teeth and rolling their eyes, but he isn’t afraid because he has magic powers that allow him to control them all. They make him king of all Wild Things so they can hang from trees together howling at the moon like friends should do on a Saturday night!

Max then tells the Wild Things to stop and sends them to bed without supper. He smells his dinner from across the ocean, but he’s lonely because no one loves him as much as they do.

As Max leaves, the Wild Things try to get him to stay. They gnash their teeth and roll their eyes, saying that they love him so much. He waves goodbye and sails back home. Weeks later he’s returned to his room where he finds supper waiting for him; it is still hot. The book explores how one should handle emotions in different situations such as when Max was frustrated with his mother sending him to bed or when he escaped into his imagination with the Wild Things and then decided to return home because he missed being loved by others there.

Originally an illustrator, Sendak began writing and illustrating his own books in the 1950s. Earlier drafts of Where the Wild Things Are saw Max escaping to a land of wild horses, but Sendak found that drawing horses was too difficult. His editor suggested the “Wild Things” of the current version. Many aspects of this book are based on Jewish-Polish culture, including references to uneducated immigrants from Poland who struggled financially in America. The term “wild things,” which is used to describe children who act like animals or don’t behave properly, comes from Yiddish culture (a language spoken by Jews).

Because of his unhappy childhood, Mr. Sendak was able to be successful in life. His father didn’t come to his bar mitzvah, but he later found out that all of his family members were killed during the Holocaust. This inspired him to create books for children about real-world problems like homelessness and how they can survive them. He said that “solving social problems isn’t the real purpose” of these books; rather, they’re meant for children who are dealing with a hard world now more than ever before.”

Despite some negative reviews, the book was popular with children. Two years later, it received more favorable reviews from critics. Francis Spufford called it “One of the few books that use anger deliberately.”

In 2012, the book was named one of the Teachers’ Top 100 Books for Children by the National Education Association. Despite his refusal to write a sequel, Sendak did make connections between Where The Wild Things Are and two other books he wrote: In The Night Kitchen and Outside Over There. Several different adaptations have been made, including an animated short directed by Gene Deitch in 1973, an opera composed by Oliver Knussen in the 1980s and a live-action film directed by Spike Jonze in 2009.