About Edward Gorey, what can be said? The writer, illustrator and so-called Grandfather of Goth left purplish marks all over the Gothic genre and, indeed, any infant unfortunate enough to get in the way.
It is as the creative serial killer of children that Gorey is best known – in books like The Gashlycrumb Tinies and The Beastly Baby. In marrying macabre circumstances, Victorian settings and spare, silly verse, he pushed what children’s books could look like. He drew from some of the most obscure, surreal and frightening artists of the 19th and 20th centuries. And he had a clear and critical influence on those who came later, like Lemony Snicket and Tim Burton.
He’s one of my favourite artists. I’ve been looking forward to writing this post and marking his 100th birthday for a long time. So, put on a fur coat and paint your toenails and let’s look back over the life of one of the most unique and important contributors to 20th century Gothic canon.
Writer and illustrator Edward Gorey would have celebrated his 100th birthday on 22 February 2025. Join the Gothic Dispatch in admiring the life and work, influences and influence of the Grandfather of Goth.
A Is for Absolutely Ordinary Childhood
So Edward Gorey would have described it. You or I might disagree.
Gorey produced his first drawing – of the trains that would pass outside his grandparents’ house, rendered like sausage links – at the age of 18 months. He taught himself to read at three-and-a-half. Sometime before he turned seven, he read Alice Through the Looking Glass and Dracula one after the other, a fact his biographers and interviewers love to emphasise. It’s easy to see why. The first is a surreal tale of a lost child. The second is the masterwork of Gothic literature. And both were set and produced in England (although Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, was Irish). Between them, these two books would form the “whimsically macabre” framework that we’d now call Goreyesque.
But it wasn’t just fiction that left its mark. The whole Gorey family was prone to melodrama. Before Edward was born, his grandparents had scandalised Chicago when details of their messy divorce made the front-page of the local papers. Accusations of insanity and spells in a mental asylum haunted his grandmother. His own parents would divorce in his youth when his father ran away with a singer. One of the few positive influences seems to have come from his maternal great-grandmother, a greetings card illustrator. Gorey claimed it was from her that he inherited his talent.
It seems easy now to connect the dots between Gorey’s childhood and his inimitable style. But it would take a few years – and his high-scoring IQ – to bring them together into the shape we know. First, enlistment. Then, college. And finally, his first real job.
B Is for Book Covers
Gorey moved from Chicago to New York at the start of 1953. He’d postponed college to serve in the Army. When he eventually arrived at Harvard, he fell in with poet Frank O’Hara. O’Hara seems to be one of the few of his peers not put off by Gorey’s tall, spooky appearance. Together, they fed one another the artists who would influence the work of both. At the centre of their shared world was Ronald Firbank and his dry witticisms, elliptical structure, coded queerness and English idiosyncrasies – Goreyesque elements one and all. By the time both were in New York, however, Gorey and O’Hara lost touch. Though they started in the same place, their work took them worlds apart. (That is, as far apart as you can get when you live only one subway stop away.)
The work I’m referring to was not his day job. That was at Anchor Books, an imprint of Doubleday, where Gorey would illustrate and hand-letter book covers. At Anchor, founders Jason and Barbara Epstein wanted to give high-brow literature the mass market treatment. They had a clear vision of what they wanted. Edward Gorey, whose illustrations they discovered in an issue of Harper’s Magazine, was perfect. He would go on to illustrate around 50 books for the imprint. If the Epsteins had had their way, he would have done many more.
The true work, the culmination of everything he’d read and seen and experienced, also came in 1953. The Unstrung Harp is a musing on the solitary life of a writer and the even more isolating, surreal experiences that come after publication. “I thought [it] was a neat trick,” Gorey said in a 1984 interview for The Boston Globe Magazine. “I had never written a book before, and it was all about writing, which I didn’t know anything about.” He would soon learn.
C Is for Cult Success
Gorey’s time at Doubleday proved fruitful for his own work. He credited his output between 1953 and 1960 – including The Listing Attic, The Doubtful Guest and The Object-Lesson – to the fact that he could illustrate book covers competently and quickly. With the time left over, he would work on his own little books.
But credit for getting them in readers’ hands has to go to Frances Steloff and her Gotham Book Mart. Her bookshop, which sadly closed in 2007, was a refuge for the struggling, striving writer. Gorey had been ordering books from Steloff since his days in the Army. Now, he was the one dropping them off – turning a friendship founded on a love of obscure books into a profitable working relationship.
Under owners Steloff and, later, Andreas Brown, Gotham Book Mart became something of a shrine to the cult of Edward Gorey. The store displayed his books at the cash register. It held exhibitions of his illustrations. It sold merchandise and gave fans somewhere to hang out in the off chance they would meet Gorey when he popped in. This was a level of fame with which Gorey was just about comfortable. But it would only last until 1973, when his past came back to haunt him.
Gorey was approached by Dennis Rosa who, with producer John Wulp, was putting together a small stage production of Dracula. Would Gorey like to design the sets?
D Is for Distractions (and Death)
Edward Gorey’s Dracula, as it was colloquially known, was a runaway success and moved to Broadway in 1977. Gorey’s crosshatched illustrations reached an entirely new audience, garnered critical acclaim and won him the Tony for costume and set design. He watched the ceremony on television from his home in Cape Cod – he had started splitting his time between there and New York City in 1963.
“The more I go along,” he told Stephen Schiff in The New Yorker, “the more I think how awful it would be to be rich and famous.” He was, nevertheless, quite happy to lend his newly minted mainstream fame to others. Department stores invited Edward Gorey to arrange their windows. He licensed his Dracula designs to a wallpaper producer. He illustrated the animated opening titles for the PBS show Mystery!, which was hosted by Vincent Price.
As always happens when a cult icon becomes mainstream, those who were there at the start become a little upset. If it wasn’t a new book, these fans considered it a distraction. Even his tiny productions in and around Cape Cod – some featuring actors, others using handmade puppets – weren’t enough to satisfy them entirely. He put out new books steadily throughout the end of the 20th century and, by his death in 2000, had published 116 books. Unfortunately for us all, he left behind a colossal cache of many more unfinished works.
Among those who call Edward Gorey an influence are Lemony Snicket and Tim Burton. Gorey’s home in Cape Cod has since been turned into the Edward Gorey House Museum.