Edward Gorey

Edward St. John Gorey was an American writer, artist, illustrator, and Tony Award-winning costume designer whose work belongs unmistakably to the twentieth century, even when it seems to have stepped out of an older parlor. Born in Chicago on February 22, 1925, he became known for pen-and-ink drawings that often place vaguely unsettling scenes in Victorian and Edwardian settings. His books could be comic, macabre, wordless, or all three at once, and they drew a cult following around an imagination that was dry, formal, and quietly strange.

Gorey’s early life was marked by quick learning and self-direction. He began drawing at eighteen months and taught himself to read by age three. His parents, Helen Dunham Gorey and Edward Leo Gorey, divorced when he was eleven. He later said he had inherited his artistic talents from his maternal great-grandmother, Helen St. John Garvey, a nineteenth-century greeting card illustrator. After public school in Wilmette, Illinois, and Francis W. Parker School in Chicago, he spent 1944 to 1946 in the Army at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. He entered Harvard in 1946, studied French, roomed with poet Frank O’Hara, and graduated in 1950.

Although Gorey often said his formal art training was “negligible,” he made a full career from drawing, design, and the odd logic of the printed page. He studied for one semester at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1943. In the early 1950s, with recent Harvard and Radcliffe alumni including Alison Lurie, John Ashbery, Donald Hall, and Frank O’Hara, he helped found the Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge. That mix of literature, performance, wit, and restraint stayed close to the center of his work.

From 1953 to 1960, Gorey lived in Manhattan and worked in the Art Department of Doubleday Anchor, where he illustrated covers, added drawings to texts, and designed typography. Over his career, he illustrated more than 200 book covers for Doubleday Anchor, Random House’s Looking Glass Library, Bobbs-Merrill, and as a freelance artist. He illustrated works by Bram Stoker, H. G. Wells, and T. S. Eliot, and later made cover and interior art for many children’s books by John Bellairs, as well as books begun by Bellairs and continued by Brad Strickland.

His first independent book, The Unstrung Harp, appeared in 1953. He also published under many pen names, including anagrams such as Ogdred Weary, Dogear Wryde, and Ms. Regera Dowdy. His style was so associated with old British settings that many assumed he was British, though he only left the United States once, to visit the Scottish Hebrides. In 1977, his designs for the Broadway revival of Dracula brought him the Tony Award for Best Costume Design and a nomination for Best Scenic Design. In 1980, his animated introduction to the PBS series Mystery!, welcomed by host Vincent Price at “Gorey Mansion,” made him familiar to many more viewers.

In later years Gorey lived year-round in Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, where he wrote and directed evening-length entertainments, often using his own papier-mâché puppets with Le Theatricule Stoique. He was also devoted to the New York City Ballet, attending every performance and some rehearsals for 25 years. Gorey died on April 15, 2000, but his plain sentences, formal titles, and uneasy images still hold readers because they leave so much unsaid. They are funny, chilly, exact, and open-ended, inviting the reader to finish the shadow for themselves.