RIDGEFIELD, Conn. — The characters of Maurice Sendak may live in the imaginations of children around the world, but many of those characters were born in a wooded residential neighborhood on the outskirts of Ridgefield in a rambling shingle house where Sendak lived and worked beginning in the early 1970s.
In his will, Sendak — widely considered one of the most important children’s authors of the 20th century and beloved for Where the Wild Things Are — wrote that he wanted his home here to operate “as a museum or similar facility, to be used by scholars, students, artists, illustrators and writers, and to be opened to the general public” as the Maurice Sendak Foundation’s directors saw fit. But in recent interviews with the foundation’s leadership and several Ridgefield Sendak supporters, it appears that it might be a very long time before the general-public part of Sendak’s desire comes to pass.
See Wednesday’s Family section for more about the project.