In our Biographies We Need series, Biographile writers look at the lives of some extraordinary individuals and ask the nagging question: Where's their definitive biography? For Banned Books Week, we're making an impassioned call for a definitive biography of Maurice Sendak, an author all too familiar with wanton censorship.

Widely considered the most important children’s book artist of the 20^th century, Maurice Sendak was an avuncular figure who understood the myriad impulses -- dark, mischievous, whimsical, angry, gentle -- living inside every child.

What made him different from other children’s book writers was that he, in his own words, refused to "cater to the bullshit of innocence"; his books were more likely to feature toothy monsters and rebellious porkers than fuzzy bunnies and sweet lullabies. He was so prolific that virtually no obituary written after his death, in May of 2012, approximates how many works he created, because in addition to writing or illustrating (or both) more than sixty children’s books, he also designed sets for operas, narrated a Yiddish-imbued version of Peter and the Wolf, helped develop Sesame Street, and produced Spike Jonze’s film version of his 1963 masterpiece, "Where the Wild Things Are." He was a polymath who often bemoaned being labeled a "mere illustrator," perhaps without realizing that most people would never have dared.

An oeuvre as impressive as Sendak’s would be enough to warrant a biography, but his life apart from his work was also fascinating, exuberant, and a little scary. Born in 1928 in Brooklyn, Maurice was the third and youngest child of Philip, a dressmaker, and Sadie, both first generation Jewish immigrants from Poland.

Maurice’s early life was dominated by illness, which left him bedridden for months. It was then he fell in love with books, which he later described as "holy objects." The Holocaust cast a black pall over the Sendak house, as many members of both sides of the family were annihilated in the camps. The experience of grieving for relatives he would never meet, along with the crushing confrontation with the power of blind hatred, haunted Maurice for the rest of his life. Though he later identified as an atheist, he remained greatly influenced by traditional shtetl storytelling, and collaborated with notable Jewish writers Ruth Krauss, Tony Kushner and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Sendak the man was full of complexities. He was simultaneously gregarious and splenetic, erudite and uneducated, open and mysterious. In interviews, he is notably forthcoming, and yet he had a fifty-year relationship with psychiatrist Eugene Glynn without the public knowing he was gay. (He nonchalantly came out to the Times just after his 80^th birthday.) Sendak was a largely self-taught artist and man of letters, and while he was a fierce devotee of luminaries such as Emily Dickinson and William Blake, he was a dismal student, and loathed prescribed learning.

His refusal to be simple or simplify has informed his work, which, consequently, has often elicited mixed reactions. In the Night Kitchen, for example, has long been a point of controversy for its naked toddler protagonist, and many of his other books have been criticized for depicting negativities like the supernatural, bratty children, parental abandonment, and homelessness. While Sendak may not have been thrilled to be the subject of such scrutiny, having once quipped, after Salman Rushdie wrote a hatchet job of one of his books, that he "called up the Ayatollah," the fact that he was provocative and polarizing simply adds a dimension to an already colorful life that surely deserves a thorough biography. But the big question remains: who will illustrate?