Author-illustrator Maurice Sendak’s work is the subject of a show at the Contemporary Jewish Museum

For Maurice Sendak, the prolific, award-winning author and illustrator of more than 100 children’s books, no place is safe, not even a child’s bedroom.

The snug comfort of idealized childhood, the gauzy, soft-focus variety envisioned by hopeful parents and hawked by advertisers, doesn’t interest him. Rather, the province of Sendak’s stories is in many cases a reflection of his own fearful coming of age in a world filled with peril and savage bullies, nightmarish monsters and jackbooted boogeymen who wreaked havoc, and a barbaric society of outsiders and insiders with a caste system and a set of enforcers that make the Mafia look like a brotherhood of softies.

He has often said that his abiding theme is children’s tenacious drive to survive. “In my books, my fighting is all there, my fighting to stay alive, my fighting to communicate,” he has said.

The new exhibition “There’s a Mystery There: Sendak on Sendak” takes a novel look at the influences and biographical themes that have shaped the author’s sensibility and highlights his formidable talent as an illustrator while exploring the neurosis and terror, brilliance and humor that inform his work.

The show, organized by the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia, the repository for Sendak’s 10,000-piece archive, opens Tuesday at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.

Built around four thematic sections, the show presents more than 100 objects, encompassing original watercolors and drawings from more than 40 of Sendak’s books, as well as rare sketches, working materials, stage designs, dummy books and manuscripts. Interview footage with the 82-year-old Sendak, a notorious curmudgeon who serves as a pithy albeit cranky narrator, can be accessed via touch screen in the galleries.

The Brooklyn-born son of poor Eastern European Jewish immigrants, Sendak has been plagued by demons that have haunted him throughout his life and have emerged in his work. They include a terror of kidnapping triggered by the 1932 abduction and murder of Charles Lindbergh’s baby and especially the profoundly chilling shadow of the Holocaust, which took the lives of many of his relatives.

For example, in Sendak’s frightening drawing for a nearly forgotten Wilhelm Grimm story, “Dear Mili,” about a girl sent into the woods to escape an impending war she doesn’t survive, Sendak links Grimm’s tale to the true story of Anne Frank and the plight of Jews forced into hiding.

He shows the title character wandering in a burned out, denuded forest where the trees resemble corpses; a silhouette of the guard tower at Auschwitz looms in the background.

Horror also finds its way into a pen-and-ink drawing of the devil with tiny minions scrambling at his feet, a truly demonic incarnation created for a collection of short stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

“Scariness is important to Sendak,” says Patrick Rodgers, the Rosenbach’s coordinator of traveling exhibitions.

“Look at how he grew up: His generation saw Europe descend into fascism, and he was aware of every family member who was eradicated in the Holocaust, every village that was razed. Half his family was killed.

“To be true to himself as an artist, he must deal with scary things in his work. The Holocaust looms very large, and so do other ghosts: AIDS, kidnappings, poverty, war.”

Early in his career, the fear quotient made Sendak a lightning rod for child psychologists such as Bruno Bettelheim and some concerned parents, who believed that their sensitive offspring were too fragile to handle the dark undercurrents of his books. With the 1963 publication of what is now acknowledged as his masterpiece, “Where the Wild Things Are,” the controversy surrounding the artist reached its apex. But the admonitions and finger wagging haven’t prevented Sendak’s stories from being adored by legions of children.

The fantastical and playfully dangerous realms to which he has transported young readers have offered comfort and escape for millions of kids grappling with the travails of growing up. They are found in books such as “Kenny’s Window,” about the adventures of a boy whose bedroom window becomes a magical portal, and “In the Night Kitchen,” where Mickey, in a dream state, floats down from his room to a kitchen with a bevy of rotund bakers who busily fold him into the cake batter.

In the aforementioned “Wild Things,” naughty Max, after being sent to his room without supper, dons a wolf suit and consorts with an array of hairy and horned mythical beasts.

In a tribute to the cathartic power of literature, Sendak admits to working out his own long-standing childhood grudge against a despised uncle by turning him into the ugliest creature in the latter book, though he declines to divulge which one.

The brightly colored, original illustrations and final watercolors for “Wild Things” — a film adaptation, directed by Spike Jonze, is due out in mid-October — and a 1930s comics-inspired picture for “Night Kitchen” are among the high points of the museum show.

However, no Sendak retrospective would be complete without the infamously misbehaving, tantrum-throwing children beloved by fans. Take Pierre, for instance, introduced in the early 1960s: The author’s alter ego stands on a chair and shouts his favorite anthem, “I don’t care,” to whomever will listen, while his mortified parents look on.

Sendak “creates characters that are easy for kids to identify with,” Rodgers says. “They’re simple, with loud personalities, a lot of brass and a big taste for adventure. And, fantasy aside, they behave like real kids.” Hey, out there, you know who you are.

But it’s the portion of the exhibition devoted to Sendak’s specialty — monsters, boogeymen and bullies — that’s likely to elicit the greatest enthusiasm from youngsters and those adults for whom childhood was more battleground than playground.

“What is too often overlooked is the fact that, from their earliest years, children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions. That fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives,” observes Sendak in an exhibition text panel. “And it is through fantasy that they achieve catharsis.”