Edward Gorey
Gorey, in the kitchen of his home at Yarmouth, Cape Cod, 1999
Birth name	Edward St. John Gorey
Born	(1925-02-22)February 22, 1925 Chicago, Illinois, United States
Died	April 15, 2000(2000-04-15) (aged 75) Cape Cod Hospital, Hyannis, Massachusetts, United States
Nationality	American
Field	Writer, Illustrator, Poet
Training	Mainly self-taught; briefly: The School of The Art Institute of Chicago
Movement	Literary nonsense, Surrealism
Works	Gashlycrumb Tinies, Doubtful Guest, Animation introducing "Mystery" on PBS
Influenced by	Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Tiger Lillies, Agatha Christie, Charles Dickens, Eugéne Ionesco, Robert Musil, Vermeer, Balthus
Influenced	Daniel Handler, Tim Burton, Richard Sala, Shaun Tan, Amy Winfrey[citation needed]
Awards	Tony Award (costume design); Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis (writing)

Edward St. John Gorey (February 22, 1925 – April 15, 2000) was an American writer and artist noted for his macabre illustrated books.^[1]

Early life[link]

Edward St. John Gorey was born in Chicago. His parents, Helen Dunham (née Garvey) and Edward Lee Gorey,^[2] divorced in 1936 when he was 11, then remarried in 1952 when he was 27. One of his stepmothers was Corinna Mura (1909–1965), a cabaret singer who had a small role in the classic film Casablanca as the woman playing the guitar while singing "La Marseillaise" at Rick's Café Américain. His father was briefly a journalist. Gorey's maternal great-grandmother, Helen St. John Garvey, was a popular 19th century greeting card writer and artist, from whom he claimed to have inherited his talents.

Gorey attended a variety of local grade schools and then the Francis W. Parker School. He spent 1944 to 1946 in the Army at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, and then attended Harvard University from 1946 to 1950, graduating in the class of 1950, where he studied French and roomed with poet Frank O'Hara.^[3]

In the early 1950s, Gorey, with a group of recent Harvard alumni including Alison Lurie (1947), John Ashbery (1949), and Donald Hall (1951), Frank O'Hara, amongst others, founded the Poets' Theatre in Cambridge, which was supported by Harvard faculty members John Ciardi and Thornton Wilder.^[3][4][5]

He frequently stated that his formal art training was "negligible"; Gorey studied art for one semester at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1943.

Career[link]

From 1953 to 1960, he lived in New York City and worked for the Art Department of Doubleday Anchor, illustrating book covers and in some cases adding illustrations to the text. He illustrated works as diverse as Dracula by Bram Stoker, The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells, and Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot. In later years he produced cover illustrations and interior artwork for many children's books by John Bellairs, as well as books begun by Bellairs and continued by Brad Strickland after Bellairs' death.

His first independent work, The Unstrung Harp, was published in 1953. He also published under pen names that were anagrams of his first and last names, such as Ogdred Weary, Dogear Wryde, Ms. Regera Dowdy, and dozens more. His books also feature the names Eduard Blutig ("Edward Gory"), a German language pun on his own name, and O. Müde (German for O. Weary).

The New York Times credits bookstore owner Andreas Brown and his store, the Gotham Book Mart, with launching Gorey's career: "it became 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." ^[6]

Gorey's illustrated (and sometimes wordless) books, with their vaguely ominous air and ostensibly Victorian and Edwardian settings, have long had a cult following. Gorey became particularly well-known through his animated introduction to the PBS series Mystery! in 1980, as well as his designs for the 1977 Broadway production of Dracula, for which he won a Tony Award for Best Costume Design. (He was also nominated for Best Scenic Design.)