Year: Day to Day Men: February 22

White Cloth

The twenty-second of February in 1925 marks the birth date of American writer and illustrator Edward St. John Gorey. A Tony Award winner for his costume design, he is noted for his distinctive pen and ink drawings that depicted unsettling narrative scenes in Victorian and Edwardian settings.

Born in Chicago, Illinois to Edward Leo Gorey and Helen Dunham Garvery, Edward Gorey began drawing at an early age and had taught himself to read by the age of three. After skipping several grades, he entered the progressive Francis W. Parker School in the ninth grade. An exceptional student, Gorey had the highest regional scores on college boards and, upon graduation, had scholarships to Harvard, Yale and other institutions. After graduation at the age of seventeen, he enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago for art courses. During World War II, Gorey entered the U.S. Army in 1943 and served primarily at Utah’s Dugway Proving Grounds until the end of the war. 

Gorey enrolled at Harvard University in 1946, majoring in French literature, and became a co-founder of the influential Poets Theatre with friends Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Violet Lang and Alison Lurie. In 1953, he was offered a position with Doubleday’s imprint, Doubleday Anchor, in New York City. Gorey quickly became a significant figure in New York’s design circles. He designed over fifty covers for the imprint and gained recognition as a major commercial illustrator. Duting his career, the number of published works illustrated by Gorey, not including his own, exceeded five hundred. In the early 1960s, he became a life-long freelancer who both illustrated others’ work as well as his own. The first of these was the well-received 1953 “The Unstrung Harp”, one of the early examples of the graphic novel movement.

In the early 1940s while in the Army, Gorey established an early association with New York City’s mid-town Gotham Book Mart. A voracious reader, he started accumulating a unique library which at the time of his death number some twenty-five thousand books. Over the years, he developed friendships with both Frances Steloff, the bookshop’s founder, and Andreas Brown, who later eventually became the bookshop’s owner. When Gorey founded his own private press imprint, Fantod Press, the Gotham Book Mart became a major seller of Gorey’s books and, at the end of 1967, an exhibition space for his drawings. Gorey would exhibit his work there for the next thirty-two years; Andreas Brown would become one of the coexecutors of Gorey’s estate. 

Edward Gorey was always interested in the theater and became involved with off-Broadway productions. In his later years living on Cape Cod, he wrote and directed many evening productions, some of which featured his own paper-mâché puppet ensemble called Le Theatricule Stoique. The first of his productions was “Lost Shoelaces” which premiered in the small village of Woods Hole near Martha’s Vineyard in August of 1987. His last production was “The White Canoe: An Opera Seria for Hand Puppets”, with a libretto by Gorey and score by composer Daniel James Wolf. Performed posthumously under the direction of Carol Verburg, the opera’s puppet stage was created by renowned set designers Helen Pond and Herbert Senn.

Gorey wrote and illustrated one hundred-sixteen of his own works. Beginning in 1961 with the publisher Diogenes Verlag, his works have been translated into fifteen languages. In 1972, Gorey published his first anthology, “Amphigorey”, which contained fifteen of his early works; three more anthologies followed and have become the cornerstones of his body of work. Gorey’s interest in book design expanded his work into other forms including miniature books, pop-up books and books with movable parts. In 1975, he became interested in printmaking and explored this medium for the next twenty-five years through a collaboration with printmaker Emily Trevor for the production of both etchings and holographs. In 1979, Gorey relocated to a house he purchased  on the Yarmouth Port Common of Cape Cod where he continued his publications, theater plays and commercial projects. 

Edward St. John Gorey passed away at the age of seventy-five at the Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis, Massachusetts on the fifteen of April in 2000. After his death, friend and coexecutor Andreas Brown discovered a cache of unpublished work, both complete and incomplete. Gorey’s Yarmouth house is now the Edward Gorey House Museum. The bulk of his estate was given to a charitable trust benefitting cats and dogs, as well asl, other species, including insects and bats.

Notes:  After his arrival in New York City in 1953, Edward Gorey became a frequent attendee and admirer of Russian ballet choreographer George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet. He attended every performance of every production that Balanchine had choreographed and considered Balanchine a major influence on his work. 

In February of 1980, Edward Gorey was asked to design an animated introduction for Boston Public Television’s “Mystery” series. His work with animator Derek Lamb and team produced what, almost forty-five years later, is considered by many to be Gorey’s most iconic work.  

The Edward Gorey House and Museum in Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts is open for visits. Its online site, with information on exhibitions and its store, can be found at: https://www.edwardgoreyhouse.org

Top Insert Image: Richard Avedon, “Edward Gorey, Cape Cod, Massachusetts”, October 18, 1992, Gelatin Silver Print, Richard Avedon Foundation

Second and Third Insert Images: Edward Gorey, “Mystery”, Intro for Boston Public Television Series, 1980, Film Gifs

Bottom Insert Image: Edward Gorey, Cover Illustration for John Bellairs’s “The Chessmen of Doom”, Johnny Dixon Mystery Series, 1989, Dial Books