Edward Gorey
Edward St. John Gorey[1] (February 22, 1925 – April 15, 2000) was an American writer, Tony Award-winning costume designer,[2] and artist, noted for his own illustrated books as well as cover art and illustration for books by other writers.[3] His characteristic pen-and-ink drawings often depict vaguely unsettling narrative scenes in Victorian and Edwardian settings.
Edward Gorey
April 15, 2000 (aged 75)
American
Writer, illustrator, poet, costume designer
Early life[edit]
Gorey was born in Chicago. His parents, Helen Dunham (née Garvey) and Edward Leo Gorey,[4] divorced in 1936 when he was 11. His father remarried in 1952 when he was 27. His stepmother was Corinna Mura (1910–1965), a cabaret singer who had a small role in 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 nineteenth-century greeting card illustrator,[5] from whom he claimed to have inherited his talents.
From 1934 to 1937, Gorey attended public school in the Chicago suburb of Wilmette, Illinois, where his classmates included Charlton Heston, Warren MacKenzie, and Joan Mitchell.[6] Some of his earliest preserved work appears in the Stolp School yearbook for 1937.[7] Afterward, he attended the Francis W. Parker School in Chicago. He spent 1944 to 1946 in the Army at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. He then attended Harvard University, beginning in 1946 and graduating in the class of 1950; he studied French and roomed with poet Frank O'Hara.[8] Starting in 1951, Gorey illustrated poetry books by Merrill Moore for Twayne Publishers including Case Record from a Sonnetorium (many illustrations by Gorey, 1951), and More Clinical Sonnets (1953).[9]
In the early 1950s, Gorey, with a group of recent Harvard and Radcliffe alumni including Alison Lurie (1947), John Ashbery (1949), Donald Hall (1951), and O'Hara (1950), amongst others, founded the Poets' Theatre in Cambridge, which was supported by Harvard faculty members John Ciardi and Thornton Wilder.[8][10][11]
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.[12]
The exact number of books that Edward Gorey illustrated for other authors is unknown and estimated to be over 500. A few of the authors Gorey illustrated were Merrill Moore, Samuel Beckett, Edward Lear, John Bellairs, H. G. Wells, Alain-Fournier, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot, Hilaire Belloc, Muriel Spark, Florence Parry Heide, John Updike, John Ciardi, Felicia Lamport and Joan Aiken.[32]
As an author, Gorey wrote 116 books.[33]
Many of Gorey's early works were published obscurely, making them rare and expensive.[36] He published four omnibus editions that collect as many as 15 of his books into one volume:
Gorey was very fond of word games, particularly anagrams. He wrote many of his books under pseudonyms that usually were anagrams of his own name (most famously Ogdred Weary). Some of them are listed below, with the corresponding book title(s). Eduard Blutig is also a word game: "Blutig" is German (the language from which these two books purportedly were translated) for "bloody" or "gory".
Legacy[edit]
Gorey has become an iconic figure in the goth subculture. Events themed on his works and decorated in his characteristic style are common in the more Victorian-styled elements of the subculture, notably the Edwardian costume balls held annually in San Francisco and Los Angeles, which include performances based on his works. The "Edwardian" in this case refers less to the Edwardian period of history than to Gorey, whose characters are depicted as wearing fashion styles ranging from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1930s.
Among the authors influenced by Gorey's work is Daniel Handler, who, under the pseudonym "Lemony Snicket", wrote the gothic children's book series A Series of Unfortunate Events. Shortly before Gorey's death, Handler sent a copy of the series's first two novels to him, with a letter "saying how much I admired his work, and how much I hoped that he would forgive what I'd stolen from him."
Director Mark Romanek's music video for the Nine Inch Nails song "The Perfect Drug" was designed specifically to resemble a Gorey book, with familiar Gorey elements including oversized urns, topiary plants, and glum, pale characters in full Edwardian costume.[40] Also, Caitlín R. Kiernan has published a short story entitled "A Story for Edward Gorey" (Tales of Pain and Wonder, 2000), which features Gorey's black doll.
A more direct link to Gorey's influence on the music world is evident in The Gorey End,[41] an album recorded in 2003 by The Tiger Lillies and the Kronos Quartet. This album was a collaboration with Gorey, who liked previous work by The Tiger Lillies so much that he sent them a large box of his unpublished works, which were then adapted and turned into songs. Gorey died before hearing the finished album.
In 1976, jazz composer Michael Mantler recorded an album called The Hapless Child (Watt/ECM) with Robert Wyatt, Terje Rypdal, Carla Bley, and Jack DeJohnette. It contains musical adaptations of The Sinking Spell, The Object Lesson, The Insect God, The Doubtful Guest, The Remembered Visit, and The Hapless Child. The last three songs also have been published on his 1987 Live album with Jack Bruce, Rick Fenn, and Nick Mason.
The opening titles of the PBS series Mystery! are based on Gorey's art, in an animated sequence co-directed by Derek Lamb.
In the last few decades of his life, Gorey merchandise became quite popular, with stuffed dolls, cups, stickers, posters, and other items available at malls around the United States. In 2002, a book of his interviews entitled Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey was released by author Karen Wilkin.[11]
In 2007, The Jim Henson Company announced plans to produce a feature film based on The Doubtful Guest to be directed by Brad Peyton. No release date was given and there has been no further information since the announcement. The project was later announced again in 2021, with it now also being produced by Amblin Entertainment.
The online journal Goreyesque publishes artwork, stories, and poems in the spirit of Edward Gorey's work.[42] The journal is co-sponsored by the Department of Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago and Loyola University Chicago.[43] Goreyesque was launched in tandem with the Chicago debut of two Gorey collections: Elegant Enigmas: The Art of Edward Gorey and G is for Gorey. The collections were shown at the Loyola University Museum of Art (LUMA) in Chicago, Illinois from February 15 to June 15, 2014.[44][45] Goreyesque features the work of both emerging talents and seasoned professionals, such as writers Sam Weller and Joe Meno.[46][47][48]
Contemporary American cartoonists with similar macabre style include: