Maurice Sendak

The beloved children's writer and illustrator -- of books like Where The Wild Things Are and Chicken Soup With Rice -- recently turned 80, and is still as sad, angry, and misanthropic as ever.

After undergoing triple-bypass surgery and losing his partner of 50 years, Sendak is a dark and depressing figure who has brilliantly managed to provide generations of adoring children with a legendary canon of fantasy subversively steeped in his own gloomy disposition.