Where The Wild Things Are

Maurice Sendak wrote and illustrated the 1963 picture book about Max, a boy in a wolf suit whose mischief at home gets him sent to bed without supper. His bedroom turns into a jungle, and Max sails away to an island where monsters known as the Wild Things live. Sendak first planned a story about wild horses, then realized he could not draw horses and replaced them with creatures based on caricatures of his aunts and uncles, taking the new name from a Yiddish expression for boisterous children. Winner of the Caldecott Medal in 1964, it has been adapted as an animated short, an opera and a live-action feature film.

A roundup of Barack Obama's presidential reading notes that he read it aloud, and acted it out, for children at the White House in 2014. Richard Branson put it on his list of 65 books to read in a lifetime.