A 1973 visit to "Wild Things" author Maurice Sendak's Connecticut lair

Maurice Sendak, author of the 1963 classic "Where the Wild Things Are," has died at the age of 83.

In the early 1970s, 60 Minutes visited the "Wild Things" author in his lair, deep in the forests of Connecticut. What we found was a 44-year old bachelor, whistling to himself and blasting soap operas while he worked.

What do we love most about Sendak? As Morley Safer pointed out in 1973, children's fiction is a genre that's over-populated by "the cute and saccharine," but Sendak never romanticized children or the experience of being a child.

"I remember nothing sentimental about it," he says. "Children suffer as intensely and as keenly as adults do, and let nobody tell you different."