Edward Gorey

Based on Wikipedia: Edward Gorey

When Edward Gorey died in 2000, he left the bulk of his estate not to an art museum, not to a university, but to a charitable trust benefiting cats, dogs, bats, and insects. This detail tells you almost everything you need to know about the man who spent decades drawing sinister Victorian children meeting elaborate dooms, and who attended every single performance of the New York City Ballet for twenty-five consecutive years.

Gorey was that rare creature: an artist whose work is instantly recognizable yet nearly impossible to categorize. Walk into any bookstore and you might find his books shelved in humor, cartoons, children's literature, or gothic fiction. None of these labels quite fit. His own preferred term was "literary nonsense," placing himself in the tradition of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, though his nonsense carried a distinctly macabre edge that neither of those Victorian masters ever approached.

A Chicago Childhood with Famous Classmates

Edward St. John Gorey was born in Chicago on February 22, 1925. His parents divorced when he was eleven, and his father later remarried a woman named Corinna Mura, a cabaret singer with a small but memorable role in cinema history. She's the woman playing guitar and singing "La Marseillaise" in Rick's Café Américain in the film Casablanca.

Gorey claimed to have inherited his artistic talents from his maternal great-grandmother, Helen St. John Garvey, who made her living as a greeting card illustrator in the nineteenth century. Whether genetics or coincidence, something was clearly working. His earliest preserved artwork appears in his elementary school yearbook from 1937.

The roster of Gorey's childhood classmates reads like an improbable fiction. At the public school in Wilmette, a Chicago suburb, young Edward attended class alongside Charlton Heston, who would become one of Hollywood's most recognizable leading men, Warren MacKenzie, who became a legendary studio potter, and Joan Mitchell, who would emerge as one of the most important abstract expressionist painters of the twentieth century. Whatever was in the water in that particular Illinois suburb in the 1930s, it produced an extraordinary generation.

Harvard, the Army, and the Poets' Theatre

After high school at the Francis W. Parker School in Chicago, Gorey spent two years in the Army from 1944 to 1946, stationed at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. This was a military installation used for testing chemical and biological weapons, though what Gorey actually did there remains unclear. The location seems almost too gothic to be accidental.

He then attended Harvard University, graduating in 1950 with a degree in French. His roommate was Frank O'Hara, who would become one of the most celebrated American poets of the mid-century, a key figure in the New York School of poetry and a curator at the Museum of Modern Art until his tragic death in 1966.

This Harvard cohort proved remarkably productive. In the early 1950s, Gorey joined with several recent Harvard and Radcliffe graduates to found the Poets' Theatre in Cambridge. The group included Alison Lurie, who would win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1985, John Ashbery, who would win the Pulitzer for Poetry in 1976, and Donald Hall, who would become Poet Laureate of the United States in 2006. The theater was supported by faculty members including John Ciardi and Thornton Wilder, the author of Our Town and The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

For someone who would become famous as a visual artist, Gorey's formal art training was remarkably thin. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for exactly one semester in 1943 and frequently described his training as "negligible." The rest he figured out on his own.

The Doubleday Years

From 1953 to 1960, Gorey lived in Manhattan and worked in the Art Department at Doubleday Anchor, one of the major American publishing houses. This job gave him steady income and extraordinary range. He designed book covers, added illustrations to texts, and handled typographic design for an eclectic array of titles.

Consider the breadth: Bram Stoker's Dracula, H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, and T. S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, the poetry collection that would later become the basis for the musical Cats. Each of these books demanded a different visual sensibility, and Gorey proved capable of all of them.

Over his career, he illustrated more than two hundred book covers for various publishers and more than five hundred total books for other authors. The list of writers he illustrated reads like a twentieth-century literary syllabus: Samuel Beckett, Charles Dickens, John Updike, Muriel Spark, Hilaire Belloc. He was prolific in a way that seems almost impossible given the density and precision of his work.

The Gorey Style

What made Gorey's work unmistakable? His illustrations are executed in detailed pen-and-ink, using a crosshatching technique that creates dense, textured surfaces. The settings are typically Victorian or Edwardian, filled with overstuffed furniture, heavy draperies, and elaborate architectural details. The people who inhabit these spaces are often elongated, their faces blank or bearing expressions of mild bewilderment.

And terrible things happen to them.

In The Gashlycrumb Tinies, perhaps his most famous work, Gorey presents an alphabet book in which each letter corresponds to a child meeting a gruesome end. "A is for Amy who fell down the stairs. B is for Basil assaulted by bears." The format is cheerful and pedagogical; the content is relentlessly morbid. This combination of innocent form and dark content became his signature.

Many readers assumed Gorey was British based on his style and subject matter. In fact, he left the United States exactly once in his life, for a visit to the Scottish Hebrides. The Victorian and Edwardian aesthetic was entirely an imaginative construction, not a reflection of personal heritage or travel.

Pen Names and Word Games

Gorey published 116 books under his own name, but he also published extensively under pseudonyms, most of which were anagrams of "Edward Gorey." The most famous was Ogdred Weary, under which he published The Curious Sofa and The Beastly Baby. Others included Dogear Wryde, Mrs. Regera Dowdy, Raddory Gewe, and E. G. Deadworry.

Some pen names involved additional wordplay. Eduard Blutig sounds German, and "blutig" is the German word for "bloody" or "gory," making this a bilingual pun. Books published under this name were supposedly translated from German by Mrs. Regera Dowdy, creating an elaborate fictional apparatus around what were essentially Gorey writing in his usual style.

This love of word games extended throughout his work. He created fictional authors, fictional publishing houses, and fictional literary traditions. One of his books, The Awdrey-Gore Legacy, is presented as a tribute to a deceased mystery writer named D. Awdrey-Gore (another anagram) and lists several of her novels, including The Toastrack Enigma, The Blancmange Tragedy, and The Teacosy Crime. None of these books exist except as entries in Gorey's fictional bibliography.

Broadway and the Tony Award

In 1977, Gorey's visual sensibility found a new platform: Broadway. He designed both the sets and costumes for a revival of Dracula starring Frank Langella. The production was a sensation, and Gorey won the Tony Award for Best Costume Design. He was also nominated for Best Scenic Design, losing in that category but proving that his aesthetic could translate from the intimate scale of book illustration to the grand scale of theatrical production.

Three years later, in 1980, Gorey became familiar to millions of Americans who had never encountered his books. The Public Broadcasting Service launched a new mystery anthology series called Mystery!, and Gorey created the animated title sequence. For twenty-six years, until the series ended in 2006, viewers watched his characteristic figures skulk through fog-shrouded landscapes while eerie music played. The host, Vincent Price, would welcome viewers to "Gorey Mansion." For an entire generation, this thirty-second animation was their primary association with the name Gorey.

The Cape Cod Years

In his later years, Gorey settled year-round in Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. There he created a new form of entertainment: evening-length theatrical productions featuring papier-mâché puppets, performed by an ensemble he called Le Theatricule Stoique, French for "The Stoic Little Theatre."

The first of these productions, Lost Shoelaces, premiered in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, in August 1987. The last was The White Canoe: an Opera Seria for Hand Puppets, for which Gorey wrote the libretto. The score was composed by Daniel James Wolf, and the opera was based on a poem by Thomas Moore called "The Lake of the Dismal Swamp." Gorey died before the production could be mounted; it was eventually performed under the direction of Carol Verburg, a close friend and neighbor.

Gorey also wrote an unproduced screenplay for a silent film called The Black Doll in the early 1970s. After his death, his executor Andreas Brown discovered a large cache of unpublished work, both complete and incomplete, which Brown described as "ample material for many future books."

During these Cape Cod years, Gorey led a life that mixed artistic production with surprising community involvement. He attended adult art classes at Cape Cod Community College and volunteered as a camera operator and master control operator at the local public access television station, where he designed graphics for community bulletins. The man who won a Tony Award was also operating the control board at community access television.

The Ballet Devotee

One aspect of Gorey's life seems disconnected from his macabre artistic vision: his absolute devotion to classical ballet, specifically the New York City Ballet. For twenty-five years, he attended every performance and many rehearsals. This was not casual appreciation. This was religious observance.

The connection perhaps makes more sense when you consider what ballet and Gorey's work share: formalism, precision, the elevation of artifice into art. Both reject naturalism in favor of stylization. Both create beauty through constraint. The tutus and arabesques of Balanchine's choreography and the crosshatched Victorians of Gorey's illustrations are both deliberately, gloriously artificial.

A Question of Category

What kind of artist was Edward Gorey? The question resisted easy answers during his lifetime and remains complicated today.

He is typically described as an illustrator, but this seems inadequate. Illustrators generally work in service of other people's texts. Gorey wrote his own books, created his own worlds, and developed a coherent artistic vision that extended across decades and hundreds of publications.

Some of his work has been taken seriously as surrealist art. The Object Lesson, for instance, is a book that defies narrative logic entirely, presenting disconnected images and sentence fragments that create an atmosphere of unease without ever resolving into meaning. It resembles the dreamlike dislocations of René Magritte or Max Ernst more than it resembles conventional illustration.

Gorey experimented constantly with the book as a form. He created wordless books, books small enough to fit in a matchbox, pop-up books, and books populated entirely by inanimate objects. Each of these experiments pushed against the boundaries of what a "book" could be.

When asked about the gothic label frequently applied to his work, Gorey offered an interesting defense of darkness in art:

If you're doing nonsense it has to be rather awful, because there'd be no point. I'm trying to think if there's sunny nonsense. Sunny, funny nonsense for children—oh, how boring, boring, boring. As Schubert said, there is no happy music. And that's true, there really isn't. And there's probably no happy nonsense, either.

This is a genuine aesthetic position, not mere provocation. Gorey believed that nonsense—true nonsense, nonsense that unsettles the reader and refuses easy interpretation—required darkness to function. Light nonsense is merely whimsy. Dark nonsense creates that productive disorientation that lingers in the mind.

A Private Person

Gorey was notably private about his personal life, particularly his sexuality. In a 1980 interview with Lisa Solod for Boston magazine, when pressed on the question of his sexual orientation, he gave a characteristically complex answer:

Well, I'm neither one thing nor the other particularly. I suppose I'm gay. But I don't really identify with it much. I am fortunate in that I am apparently reasonably undersexed or something. I do not spend my life picking up people on the streets... What I'm trying to say is that I am a person before I am anything else.

This answer resists the categories available in 1980 and continues to resist categories today. Gorey seemed genuinely uninterested in being defined by sexuality, not out of shame but out of a sense that such definitions were reductive. The critic David Ehrenstein, writing in Gay City News, noted that "to those in the know, his sensibility was clearly gay, but his sexual life was as covert as his self was overt."

Interestingly, when the interview was reprinted in Ascending Peculiarity, a collection of Gorey interviews edited by the art critic Karen Wilkin, the phrase "I suppose I'm gay" was omitted. This editorial choice speaks to the ongoing difficulty of categorizing Gorey even after his death.

The Gotham Book Mart Connection

The New York Times credited a single bookstore with launching Gorey's career: the Gotham Book Mart, owned by Andreas Brown. This legendary Manhattan institution, which operated from 1920 to 2007, became what the Times called "the central clearing house for Mr. Gorey, presenting exhibitions of his work in the store's gallery and eventually turning him into an international celebrity."

Brown served as one of Gorey's executors after his death, and it was Brown who discovered the cache of unpublished manuscripts. The relationship between artist and bookseller lasted decades and illustrates how careers in the arts often depend on individual champions rather than institutional support.

Legacy

Gorey's house in Yarmouth Port is now the Edward Gorey House Museum. At the time of his death in April 2000, he was the subject of an ongoing documentary directed by Christopher Seufert, shot in cinéma vérité style. As of 2025, the finished film and accompanying book remain in post-production, a quarter century after Gorey's death.

His influence extends far beyond his own publications. Tim Burton has cited him as an inspiration, and the visual sensibility of Burton's films—the spindly figures, the gloomy atmospheres, the combination of whimsy and darkness—clearly owes a debt to Gorey's illustrations. The television series A Series of Unfortunate Events, both in its visual design and its darkly comedic treatment of childhood peril, is essentially an extended Gorey homage.

More broadly, Gorey helped establish a space in American culture for work that is simultaneously funny and disturbing, sophisticated and accessible, morbid and delightful. He proved that darkness could be playful without being trivialized, and that playfulness could be dark without being cruel.

The four omnibus collections of his work—Amphigorey, Amphigorey Too, Amphigorey Also, and Amphigorey Again—contain more than sixty individual books between them. They remain in print and continue to find new readers, generation after generation, each discovering for the first time that awful things can be rendered beautifully, and that beauty itself can be rather awful.

Ideally, Gorey once told an interviewer, "if anything were any good, it would be indescribable." His own work comes close to meeting that standard. It exists in its own category, resistant to summary, immediately recognizable yet endlessly strange. After all these years, it remains indescribable—which is to say, it remains good.