Kid Lit Authors Quiz: Where The Wild Things Are | 10 Questions

Answer: A wolf suit

The wolf suit Max wears throughout the entire story is symbolic of his inner wild thing. He wears the suit when he makes mischief, adopting the wild thing persona, which his mother acknowledges by calling him just that. At the conclusion of the story, we see Max pushing back the hood of the wolf suit, emerging from its persona to become Max again. (However, we do not see Max remove the entire suit, indicating he will become a wild thing again, sometime in the future.)

Answer: Put a dead mouse in his father's slippers

One of the beautiful parts of this book is that not everything is explained in the text - you need to explore the illustrations (drawn by the author himself) to find out all the information. The two types of mischief are not described in the text but are depicted in the illustrations on successive pages. We saw Max damage his house by knocking nails into the walls, and his dog was obviously very scared when Max jumped toward it, brandishing a fork. Max told his mother, "He would eat her up", after she admonished him for creating havoc at home.

It also appears that Max drew on the walls.

Answer: She calls him a wild thing and sends him to his room without supper.

We never saw Max's mother - indeed, Max is the only person we saw in the entire book. We only saw him looking back angrily at his closed bedroom door after his mother sent him there without supper.

Anger is one of the three themes of the book. When Maurice first published the book in 1963, it was met with some criticism for depicting child anger (as, att the time, children's books usually featured well-behaved children who played roles within dogmatic moral lessons). When Max was sent to his room, he never apologised or addressed his wrongdoing directly (thereby prompting the required moral lesson). Instead, he directed his anger into his imagination of a fantasy world.

Answer: A forest grew.

When Max was sent to his room, he was at his angriest. Out of that anger, he created a forest that replaced the solid walls of his room. As the forest was conjured from his imagination, author Sendak wrote that "the walls became the world all around". The dense and lush jungle had no room for bedroom walls. His bedroom was no longer a prison cell without food, but it was a space on his own terms, a step back from the emotional conflicts that dominated his home, where he could work through his emotions. However, the corresponding illustrations in the book show that the bedroom-to-forest transformation literally occurred. The reader was taken on Max's journey. Author Sendak cleverly blurred imagination and reality: rather than writing that Max imagined a forest or saw it with his mind's eye, the author wrote that it merely happened.

Max was pleased with the "appearance" of the forest: we saw him with his wolf-foot kicking upwards and a hand to his mouth as he giggled with joy. Max pranced around the forest, replete with many green trees and spiky red-green vegetation, all overseen by a full moon.

Answer: An ocean appeared, and then a boat as well.

In Max's imagination, an ocean appeared next to the forest, as well as a sailboat with Max's name etched into the bow. He sailed on the ocean for almost a year. He even met a kraken (who was rather friendly-looking) on the way.

Again, we saw the power of Max's imagination. While the book, in reality, spanned a single day, in Max's imagination, the time scale is over a year

Answer: Where the Wild Things are

When the boat arrived at the place of the wild things, they greeted Max with terrible roars, terrible, sharp teeth, terrible eyes and terrible claws. They were monstrous in size, with various grotesque facial features and abundant hair. However, if you look at the illustrations, some appear to be smiling at Max.

Answer: By staring into their eyes without blinking

He yelled to the Wild Things, "Be still", before he tamed them with his stare without blinking. The Wild Things become frightened and they appointed Max their king, declaring him to be the wildest thing of all.

The Wild Things represent his anger. This is the first sign that Max tried to get his anger (for being sent to his room), under control.

Answer: The Wild Things went on a wild rumpus led by their king, Max.

After he was declared King, Max yelled to the wild things, "Let the wild rumpus start." What followed was no text but six pages, just of illustrations of the wild rumpus. (The illustrations of the wild things, indeed, the illustrations across the entire book, are beautiful and in no small way are a major part of the appeal of this book.) The rumpus began with Max and the Wild Things howling and dancing at the full moon. Next scene, in what appeared to be daytime, Max and the Wild Things hung and swung from tree branches. In the next scene, Max rode on a Wild Thing's back, wearing a crown and swinging a sceptre high in the air, as the other Wild Things danced alongside Max and his Wild Thing steed.

Then abruptly he yelled, "Stop!". He sent them off to bed without any supper. Notably, the Wild Things looked very peaceful when they were asleep.

The Wild Things represented Max's anger. We got a hint that his anger was 'self-limiting' when we first saw the wild things smiling when he met them. The wild rumpus is Max's anger raging. Abruptly, when he stopped the wild rumpus, his anger had melted away. The Wild Things, asleep at his prompt, show his temper had abated, his anger had gone, and he was calm again. Perhaps sending the Wild Things to bed without supper gave him an insight into why his mother sent him to his room without supper - it was to control the chaos that Max caused at home.

Answer: He was lonely and wanted to be where somebody loved him.

With his anger gone, Max had no time anymore for the Wild Things. He wanted to be in a place where he was loved. He could smell good things to eat. He said goodbye to the wild things - they did not want him to go, and they showed their terrible features once more.

But Max was undeterred - he wanted to go home. At this point, the Wild Things' roar showed that Max still had a temper, but he was done with anger at this time. He was back in control, albeit lonely, and determined to sail through time until he reached his bedroom (without a forest).

Answer: His dinner was waiting for him, and it was still hot.

When Max reached his bedroom, he found his supper on a table near his bed. It was still hot. This was a very important symbol in the book. It reminded Max (who also had pushed off the cap off his wolf suit, indicating he did not want to cause mischief anymore) that he belonged at home. The hot meal showed his mother still loved him despite his previous mischief-making. The meal still being hot indicated that while Max went on a long journey to see the Wild Things, in truth, it was probably only minutes in the real world.

Quiz author's note. (Optional)
As a five-year-old, this book fascinated me with the illustrations of the Wild Things. They appeared to be monsters, but they seemed to smile and were not scary. As a young adult reading the story (over and over) to my children, I understood the Wild Things represented anger, and had an appreciation of what Sendak had achieved. I also had some questions that could not be answered at the time:
1. Max had no siblings or friends in the book. Was his mischief-making due to loneliness?
2. There was no father figure present or even mentioned. His mother is the disciplinarian. Is there no father figure for Max, and is this why he is prone to mischief-making?

Over the years, I sought information on Maurice Sendak and found NPR interviews and the occasional "New York Times" columns. It appears that much of the material in this book is autobiographical. he was born in the Great Depression to Polish Jewish parents, He was thirteen when WWII started; he later found out that many of his relatives in Poland had died at the hands of the Nazis. His parents were heartbroken: his mother suffered lifelong depression. Sendak himself was a sickly child and was often confined to his bed (Aha!). Sendak said his childhood was dominated by the "spectre of death". It was not surprising, then, that he gave his character, Max, the ability to escape from the calamity of home. Sendak mentioned in more than one interview that the inspiration for the Wild Things was his own relatives, the ones that did not perish in WWII: he did not like interactions with them as they were all from Poland as escapees and their families were dead, which haunted them. They would say things to him such as "We will eat you all up!". They called him (and his brother) "vilde chaya!" which meant "wild beast". Sendak was a book illustrator before he was an author, which explains the scant text in the book, but the additional information is gleaned from the wonderful illustrations in the book.

So, when my granddaughter was born, it was with much anticipation that I dug out my copy of "Where The Wild Things Are", which was a bit battered around the edges with slightly faded covers as it was now almost sixty years old. It was a great delight to see her trace the shapes of the Wild Things just as I had nearly 60 years prior. A great book that has endured. It must surely be one of the greatest examples of children's literature ever written.