05/21/2026
Sixty years ago today, on May 20, 1966, children's author and illustrator Maurice Sendak wrote a fan letter to Robert Lee Wolff describing "perhaps the one most significant moment of my creative life." The letter, sent three years after the publication of Sendak's now-classic Where the Wild Things Are, is held in the Robert Lee Wolff Collection of 19th Century Fiction at the Ransom Center.
The letter begins: "Dear Mr. Wolff, Let me introduce myself. I write and illustrate books for children. What prompts me to write you is the only other interesting fact about me (to me)—my passion for George MacDonald." MacDonald was a pioneering 19th century author of fantastical fairy tales. Sendak goes on to write that Arthur Hughes, an illustrator of MacDonald's works, is "the illustrator I most admire and whose books I have been doggedly trying to collect."
He tells Wolff that his reading of Wolff's The Golden Key: A Study of the Fiction of George MacDonald and MacDonald's collected works Phantastes and Lilith were "perhaps the one most significant moment of my creative life." This all came full circle for Sendak when his illustrations were published in an edition of MacDonald's The Golden Key the following year in 1967.
Search an inventory of the Robert Lee Wolff Collection of 19th Century Fiction, including the letter from Maurice Sendak: https://research.hrc.utexas.edu/fasearch/findingaid.cfm?eadid=00471&showrequest=0
1. Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are (New York: Harper & Row, c1963). Harry Ransom Center Alfred and Blanche Knopf Library, PZ 8 S3294 WH KNOPF.
2. [Detail of Maurice Sendak's signature on letter to Robert Lee Wolff], May 20, 1966. Robert Lee Wolff Collection of 19th Century Fiction, Container 44.4.
3-4. George MacDonald with illustrations by Arthur Hughes, The Giant's Heart & The Golden Key (London: A.C. Fifield, 1904). Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, WOLFF-ADDM 224.
5-6. George MacDonald with illustrations by Maurice Sendak, The Golden Key (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1967). Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, PZ 7 M1475 G5.
7. George MacDonald, Phantastes and Lilith (London: Gollancz, 1962). Harry Ransom Center Alfred and Blanche Knopf Library, PR 4967 P535 1962 KNOPF.
