Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963) is one of the most analyzed picture books in the canon. The dominant reading frames it as modernist — an experimental, psychologically inflected work about a child’s anger. This reading has been useful and is not wrong. But it has also obscured a more interesting fact: the book is, structurally and emotionally, a folk tale.

Sendak, who emigrated from a Jewish family with deep Polish-Yiddish folk traditions, said in multiple late-career interviews that his work was rooted in the bedtime stories his parents had told him — not in any avant-garde tradition. “My books are old-country,” he said in a 1988 NPR interview. “They are the stories my parents told me. They look modern because the pictures are mine. The shape underneath is very old.”

Once you read the book this way, the folk structure becomes obvious.

The seven elements

1. The hero is wronged at home and sent away. Max is sent to bed without supper. This is the standard ATU 720–780 banishment opening.

2. The journey is supernatural. A forest grows in Max’s bedroom; the room becomes the world. Compare East of the Sun, West of the Moon (the ride on the bear), The Six Swans (the brothers transformed), countless others.

3. The hero encounters the Other — frightening at first, then mastered. Max meets the wild things. They threaten him. He stares them down. They make him king. This is the classic encounter with the forest spirits arc, structurally identical to a hundred Slavic tales.

4. The hero has a wild interlude. The “wild rumpus” — three wordless spreads, the longest wordless sequence in any picture book of the period. This is the Bacchic / Saturnalian element that appears in folk tradition as the misrule interval, the time when normal rules are inverted before the return.

5. A test of resolution. Max grows tired. He sends the wild things to bed without their supper. The reversal — the punished becoming the punisher — is one of the oldest moves in folk literature.

6. The hero is called home by smell, not by sight. “From far away across the world he smelled good things to eat.” This sensory call-back is unusual in modernist literature but extremely common in folk tradition. The hero is summoned by the kitchen — the warm domestic core that contains the world.

7. Return, transformation, restoration. Max sails back, finds his supper waiting — still hot. The closing image is one of the warmest, most folk-traditional endings in 20th-century literature.

Why this matters

The dominant “modernist anger” reading frames Max as a child working through psychological repression. The folk reading frames him as a child completing a ritual journey — an initiation, complete with banishment, supernatural encounter, mastery, and homecoming.

These readings are not opposed. They are, in fact, the same reading at different levels of resolution. The folk tale always was the working-through of psychological material. What Sendak did was strip the form down to its 38-page essence and trust the picture book to carry the full weight of a tradition that had previously needed novels to carry.

For families reading this aloud

The book is, famously, perfect for ages 3–5. What is sometimes missed is that older children — 8, 9, 10 — should return to it. The patterns become visible at that age. Reading it together with an older child and asking “what other story is this like?” is one of the gentlest introductions to comparative folklore that exists.

Sendak knew exactly what he was doing. He told the BBC in 2003: “I just wrote a fairy tale and put it in a child’s bedroom. The fairy tale was already there. I gave it pictures.”

— Sources: Sendak, M., interview with Robert Siegel, NPR All Things Considered, May 9, 1988; Cech, J., Angels and Wild Things: The Archetypal Poetics of Maurice Sendak, Penn State Press, 1995.