By Maurice Sendak
A boy in a wolf suit, sent to bed hungry and furious, sails off to become king of the monsters, then comes home to find his supper still warm.
Max spends the day in his wolf suit making mischief all over the house, so his mother sends him to bed with no supper. That night his room sprouts a forest and then an ocean, and he sails off to where the wild things are — enormous monsters with terrible teeth and terrible claws and terrible roars. Max stares them down without blinking, and they make him their king. Then comes the wild rumpus: howling and swinging from trees under the moon. After a while he wants to be somewhere someone loves him best, so he sails all the way home. His supper is waiting for him, and it's still hot.
It takes the feeling a small child knows best, the fury of being sent to your room, and follows it all the way out to a monster island and back to a supper that's still warm. That's a good part of why it has lasted sixty years. Sendak never scolds Max for the tantrum; he lets it run wild and then lets it pass. The monsters look ferocious and behave like big goofy puppies. And when Max sails home, the book doesn't stop to explain a thing — the warm supper waiting in his room is the whole comfort.