The Strange Case of Edward Gorey by Alexander Theroux

Throughout his career, he illustrated over 200 book covers for Doubleday Anchor, Random House's Looking Glass Library, Bobbs-Merrill, and as a freelance artist. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.

He illustrated works as diverse as Bram Stoker's Dracula, H. Gorey in the kitchen of his home at Yarmouth, Cape Cod, 1999įrom 1953 to 1960, he lived in Manhattan and worked for the Art Department of Doubleday Anchor, where he illustrated book covers, added illustrations to text, and provided typographic design. 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. In the early 1950s, Gorey, with a group of recent Harvard 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. 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). 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. He spent 1944 to 1946 in the Army at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. Some of his earliest preserved work appears in the Stolp School yearbook for 1937. John Garvey, was a nineteenth-century greeting card illustrator, from whom he claimed to have inherited his talents.įrom 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. Gorey's maternal great-grandmother, Helen St.

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 remarried in 1952 when he was 27. His parents, Helen Dunham (née Garvey) and Edward Leo Gorey, divorced in 1936 when he was 11. His characteristic pen-and-ink drawings often depict vaguely unsettling narrative scenes in Victorian and Edwardian settings.Įdward St. John Gorey (February 22, 1925 – April 15, 2000) was an American writer, Tony Award-winning costume designer, and artist, noted for his own illustrated books as well as cover art and illustration for books by other writers. The Gashlycrumb Tinies, The Doubtful Guest, Mystery!Įdward St.

Writer, illustrator, poet, costume designer Cape Cod Hospital, Hyannis, Massachusetts, U.S.Īrt Institute of Chicago, Harvard University

The Strange Case of Edward Gorey by Alexander Theroux