Maurice Sendak (born June 10, 1928) U.S. writer and illustrator of children’s books – Where The Wild Things Are (1963)
Read an October 2, 2011, article in The Guardian about Sendak here
"To his millions of readers, of course, Sendak will always be young, a proxy for Max in Where the Wild Things Are, who runs away from his mother's anger into the consoling realm of his own imagination. There are monsters in there, but Max faces them down before returning to his mother for reconciliation and dinner. Sendak's own exile took rather longer to resolve. The monsters from Wild Things were based on his own relatives. They would visit his house in Brooklyn when he was growing up ("All crazy – crazy faces and wild eyes") and pinch his cheeks until they were red. Looking back, he sees how desperate they all were, these first-generation immigrants from Poland, with no English, no education and, although they didn't know it in 1930, a family back home facing extinction in the concentration camps."
Listen to a 2012 interview with Sendak here
Watch Sendak talk about his favorite books
here
Saul Bellow (born June 10, 1915) Canadian novelist, short story writer, winner 1976 Literature Nobel Prize – Herzog
Terence Rattigan (born June 10, 1911) U.K. playwright – The Winslow Boy
Samartha Vashishtha (born June 10, 1983) Indian poet, translator, technical writer
Read some of Vashishtha's poems here
Benjamin Millepied (born June 10, 1977) French dancer, choreographer – Black Swan (2010) (choreographer)