(ASSOCIATED PRESS)

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — Benedict Arnold is a hero again, at least temporarily, at two upstate New York historic sites where his pre-treason exploits are being remembered.

Arnold‘s heroic actions in the Revolutionary War’s Battles of Saratoga are detailed in a new exhibit opening Thursday at Saratoga National Historical Park, and his capture of British-held Fort Ticonderoga at the side of Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys is being re-staged later this month in a rare nighttime re-enactment.

The Connecticut-born Arnold led American soldiers through Fort Ticonderoga’s front gate in a pre-dawn raid on May 10, 1775, and he helped defeat the British at the Battles of Saratoga two years later. But most Americans know Arnold as the man who betrayed his nation by trying to turn over the American fortifications at West Point to the British, then joining the redcoats when the plot was uncovered.

Soon after the war broke out at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, the ambitious Arnold began displaying the prickly personality traits that made him a polarizing figure years before he switched sides.

“He was hated long before he became a traitor,” said Eric Schnitzer, a park ranger at Saratoga National Historic Park in Stillwater, 20 miles north of Albany. “Some of the guys fighting with him thought he was a total and complete jerk. Other guys thought he was wonderful.”

Count the Green Mountain Boys among the former. Angry at Arnold for his orders forbidding them from looting their British captives, the New Englanders broke into Fort Ticonderoga’s rum supply instead, then took drunken potshots at the 34-year-old Arnold, who escaped unscathed.

At Saratoga, he clashed with his fellow officers, including the commander of American forces, Gen. Horatio Gates. Despite helping stem the British advance in the first Saratoga battle and getting wounded while charging enemy lines during the second, Arnold was given little official credit at the time for the American victory many historians consider the turning point of the war.

Feeling slighted after being passed over for promotions, and in deepening debt due to his extravagant lifestyle and courting of a Philadelphia woman nearly half his age, Arnold began plotting to hand over West Point to the British in exchange for money. After being given command of the American fortifications guarding the Hudson River north of Manhattan, Arnold attempted to slip information on troop and artillery positions to the British via a spy, Maj. John Andre.

The plot ended when Andre was caught with Arnold’s handwritten details of the defenses at West Point, along with a pass signed “B. Arnold.” Andre was hanged days later. By then, Arnold had already gone over the British.

The Saratoga park exhibit includes photographs of the two Arnold documents, which are kept in the New York State Archives in Albany. It also features historically accurate replicas of the uniforms Arnold would have worn, both as an American general and a British officer.

The exhibit — “Broken Trusts, the Chequered Career of Benedict Arnold” — runs through April 2013.

At Ticonderoga, the May 19 restaging of the fort’s capture is the first nighttime re-enactment at the privately owned tourist attraction since the one held on May 10, 1975, the raid’s 200th anniversary.

Stuart Lilie, director of interpretation at Fort Ticonderoga, said about 60 re-enactors from as far away as Ohio and South Carolina are participating.

A contingent will assemble on Lake Champlain’s Vermont shore and be ferried across to the New York side in a single wooden boat making several trips, the same way it was done 237 years ago. Then they’ll march to the fort and storm through the front gate, shouting for the defenders to surrender.

The number of visitors being allowed inside the fort will be capped at 350, with reservations required.

(The Associated Press)

NEW YORK (AP) — Maurice Sendak, the children’s book author and illustrator who saw the sometimes-dark side of childhood in books like “Where the Wild Things Are” and “In the Night Kitchen,” died early Tuesday. He was 83 and lived in Ridgefield, Conn.

Longtime friend and live-in caretaker Lynn Caponera said she was with Sendak when he died at about 2:45 a.m. Tuesday at Danbury Hospital. She said Sendak suffered a stroke Friday night and never regained consciousness.

“Where the Wild Things Are” earned Sendak a prestigious Caldecott Medal for the best children’s book of 1964 and became a hit movie in 2009. President Bill Clinton awarded Sendak a National Medal of the Arts in 1996 for his vast portfolio of work.

Sendak didn’t limit his career to a safe and successful formula of conventional children’s books, though it was the pictures he did for wholesome works such as Ruth Krauss’ “A Hole Is To Dig” and Else Holmelund Minarik’s “Little Bear” that launched his career.

“Where the Wild Things Are,” about a boy named Max who goes on a journey — sometimes a rampage — through his own imagination after he is sent to bed without supper, was quite controversial when it was published, and his quirky and borderline scary illustrations for E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “Nutcracker” did not have the sugar coating featured in other versions.

Sendak also created costumes for ballets and staged operas, including the Czech opera “Brundibar,” which he also put on paper with collaborator Pulitzer-winning playwright Tony Kushner in 2003.

He designed the Pacific Northwest Ballet’s “Nutcracker” production that later became a movie shown on television, and he served as producer of various animated TV series based on his illustrations, including “Seven Little Monsters,” ”George and Martha” and “Little Bear.”

But despite his varied resume, Sendak accepted — and embraced — the label “kiddie-book author.”

“I write books as an old man, but in this country you have to be categorized, and I guess a little boy swimming in the nude in a bowl of milk (as in ‘In the Night Kitchen’) can’t be called an adult book,” he told The Associated Press in 2003.

“So I write books that seem more suitable for children, and that’s OK with me. They are a better audience and tougher critics. Kids tell you what they think, not what they think they should think.”

During that 2003 interview, Sendak also said he felt as if he were part of a dying breed of illustrators who approached their work as craftsmen. “I feel like a dinosaur. There are a few of us left. (We) worked so hard in the ’50s and ’60s but some have died and computers pushed others out.”

Sendak, who did his work in a studio at the Ridgefield, Conn., home he moved into in the early 1960s, never embraced high-tech toys. He did, however, have a collection of Mickey Mouse and other Walt Disney toys displayed throughout the house.

When director Spike Jonez made the movie version of “Where the Wild Things Are,” Sendak said he urged the director to remember his view that childhood isn’t all sweetness and light. And he was happy with the result.

“In plain terms, a child is a complicated creature who can drive you crazy” Sendak told the AP in 2009. “There’s a cruelty to childhood, there’s an anger. And I did not want to reduce Max to the trite image of the good little boy that you find in too many books.”

Sendak’s own life was clouded by the shadow of the Holocaust. He had said that the events of World War II were the root of his raw and honest artistic style.

Born in 1928 and raised in Brooklyn, Sendak said he remembered the tears shed by his Jewish-Polish immigrant parents as they’d get news of atrocities and the deaths of relatives and friends. “My childhood was about thinking about the kids over there (in Europe). My burden is living for those who didn’t,” he told the AP.

Sendak, his sister Natalie, and late brother Jack, were the last of the family on his father’s side since his other relatives didn’t move to the United States before the war. The only family member Sendak really knew on his mother’s side was his grandmother.

Sendak didn’t go to college and worked a string of odd jobs until he went to work at the famous toy store FAO Schwarz as a window dresser in 1948. But it was his childhood dream to be an illustrator and his break came in 1951 when he was commissioned to do the art for “Wonderful Farm” by Marcel Ayme.

By 1957 he was writing his own books.

Sendak received the international Hans Christian Andersen medal for illustration in 1970. In 1983 he won the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award from the American Library Association.

But it was “Brundibar,” a folk tale about two children who need to earn enough money to buy milk for their sick mother that Sendak completed when he was 75, that he was most proud of. “This is the closest thing to a perfect child I’ve ever had.”

Sendak stayed away from the book-signing bandwagon that many other authors use for publicity; he said he couldn’t stand the thought of parents dragging children to wait on line for hours to see a little old man in thick glasses.

“Kids don’t know about best sellers,” he said. “They go for what they enjoy. They aren’t star chasers and they don’t suck up. It’s why I like them.”