Ridgefield Author Maurice Sendak Dies at 83

Ridgefield's famed children's book author and illustrator Maurice Sendak died Tuesday, May 8, at the age of 83.

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 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.

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."