In 1980 the world became aware of Edward Gorey. His unique style of pen and ink drawing with only a splash of read suited Masterpiece Theatre's spinoff, Mystery!, to a tee and everyone was watching. The opening credits animated by Derek Lamb are iconic. What's more the sets the various hosts used were designed by Gorey, much like his Broadway production of Dracula three years earlier for which he won a Tony. He became known as the king of the macabre. Without him there would be no Tim Burton, no Neil Gaiman, no Lemony Snicket, though perhaps we could have done without Lemony Snicket. His cultural impact has not waned since his death in 2000. Thanks to the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust and Pomegranate Communications his name and his work are constantly available. But while he really came to the forefront thanks to PBS he had been making a name for himself in New York since the fifties. The young Gorey was a prodigy, growing up throughout the Chicago area. His scholarships to various Ivy League schools had to be deferred due to the war and he served at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. In 1946 he finally entered Harvard majoring in French Literature, because if you're going to read the great and melodramatic French novels you have to read them in French. In an interesting twist of fate he would room with Frank O'Hara who would also go on to be a darling of the literary world. But it wasn't just books that interested Gorey, it was all art, theatre, ballet, poetry, prose. His academic career was rocky, it all depended on if he was interested at the time in what he was doing. When he was he'd be on the Dean's List, when he wasn't, he was threatened with expulsion. His actual training in art was negligible. But that is what he'd go on to be known for, not writing some obscure commentary on French Literature. After college he got a job illustrating book covers for the Art Department of Doubleday Anchor. Covers that are iconic to this day. Especially his vibrant cover for The War of the Worlds. At the end of his tenure there he started to publish little books indepently. Some under his own name, some under cunning psdeynoms and anagrams. Through the Gotham Book Mart he became a bit of a celebrity to those in the know. He was also a man about town, always seen at the New York City Ballet where Balanchine was king. Eventually he settled on Cape Cod where this now internationally famous artist spent time with his cats and making stuffed figures to sell at the local theatre. But no one can say he didn't leave his mark. If only sartorially.

If you want to read about Edward Gorey, this book isn't for you. Literally pick up any book by Edward Gorey and you will get more concrete information and entertainment out of it than this volume. But if you want to read about an author projecting his suppoistions, speculations, and downright crazy conspiracy theories on their subject, then this book is for you. Because Mark Dery has written a book his subject would hate. He has taken a complex and fascinating intellectual and decided to focus on Edward Gorey's sexuality. Hundreds of pages questioning if Gorey was or wasn't gay. It's like Mark Dery needed to make Gorey gay. But more than that, he didn't just want Gorey to be gay, he wanted him to be the victim of sexual assault by the clergy as a child. At least he admits it's pure speculation but he claims that the ominous nature of the clergy in Gorey's stories coupled with the abuses of the Catholic Church in Chicago when Gorey was growing up point to his insights as being accurate. What the fuck? It's one thing to postulate on sexuality, it's another to just wholey fabricate something in a biography without any kind of proof. And I will point out that in Gorey's work, everyone, not just the clergy, are menacing. It's kind of Gorey's M.O. But more to the point is that in a book that is 415 pages long minus the acknowledgements, references, and endnotes, it took Dery until page 410 to include a quote from an interview Gorey did in 1980 with Boston Magazine wherein he said "Well, I'm neither one thing nor the other particularly... I suppose I'm gay. But I don't really identify with it much." HE SAID HE WAS GAY! AND YOU, MARK DERY, KNEW IT! For 99% of this "biography" you made me listen to your speculations when you knew. YOU KNEW! You wrote about something that wasn't even a something. Gorey is an icon, and yes, him being a gay icon is important, but just use HIS WORDS not your fabricated suppositions. But then again, by the end of this book I didn't trust the author at all. He refers to Gorey's work as etchings, which they are not. He should show us the pictures instead of badly describing them but we only get twenty-six badly reproduced pieces completely out of context. And I'm sorry, but I too watched that Dick Cavett interview, and he wasn't fawning over Gorey and his work, he had no freaking idea who Gorey was and Gorey knew it. The only positive to reading this book is it enraged me so much I went back and read all the Amphilgorys and fell in love with Gorey and his work all over again.

I am a fan of Edward Gorey and was looking for word to reading this biography. Overall the book is good but I feel that is way to long and there was a lot of repetition. The author includes everything you want to know and a lot you do not want to know about his life. Like others I would have liked fewer words and more illustrations.

A delightful insight into a complicated, artist. I've loved Gorey's work for years but had little idea how fascinating his life story would turn out to be. 100. A+. Would definitely recommend.

How well do you know Edward St. John Gorey? How many of his little books have you read? Or are you a fan of his book covers and art work? Maybe you only know him from the credits to PBS's Mystery program. But if you want plenty of details, you have the right book in hand.

Mark Dery provides plenty of details in his biography of Gorey. He starts with his childhood in Chicago, followed by his stint in the US Army which he spent mainly at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. After his discharge, Gorey used his GI Bill benifits to attend Harvard majoring in French, but mainly spent his time writing and drawing while hanging out with the likes of Frank O'Hara and John Ciardi. After graduating and haning around Boston for a couple of years and getting caught up in the Poets' Theatre, Gorey moved to New York City to work in the art department of Anchor Books. There he created book covers, did illustrations, all while working on his own material. While in NYC, he perfected and published a number of small books and then got the stage-bug when he designed the set for John Wulp's Dracula which got him fame, notice, and royalties! Then his books started selling and he moved to Cape Cod in 1985. For the last 15 years, he wrote some, illustrated some and had fun putting on plays until he died in 2000 from a heart attack.

Mark Dery does a good job of documenting Gorey's life and his work. He also does a commendable job of placing Gorey in context to the society and culture. He does have a tendency to focus on particular aspects of Gorey's life that tends to distract from Gorey's life rather than explain it. But overall, a very decent read of Gorey and his work.

When Edward Gorey started publishing his strange little books in the 1950s, booksellers didn’t quite know what to do with them. Superficially they looked like children’s books, but the dark subject matter and impenetrable plots didn’t seem intended for children. Nor was humor the books’ primary purpose, though they were often funny. So they often ended up by the cash register, unclassifiable impulse buys.

Reading Mark Dery’s new Gorey biography Born to be Posthumous, we realize that the cultural history of the 20th century hasn’t really known what to do with Gorey either. He was so singular, there was no movement he could be clearly grouped with. The world he wove, in exhaustive strokes of black ink, was both deliberately dated and deliberately ambiguous.

While many of us have bumped up against Gorey, there aren’t a lot of paths leading directly to him — or away, since even the artists Dery cites as Gorey’s biggest debtors (Tim Burton and Daniel Handler) create work that functions in very different ways, for much larger audiences.

Prior to cracking the book, I realized, I didn’t even have any concept of what Edward Gorey must have been like in person. I certainly wasn’t expecting the spectacle Dery describes from his 1983 bookstore encounter with the artist.

"I was running down a book for a customer when a tall man with a beard worthy of Walt Whitman swept down the aisle. He was chattering away in a stage voice of almost self-parodic campiness, and his costume was equally outlandish, a traffic-stopping getup of Keds, rings on each finger, and clanking amulets, topped off with a floor-length fur coat dyed the radioactive yellow of Easter Peeps."

Gorey, who spent a lifetime exploring the aesthetics of Victorian and Edwardian England, was from Chicago. He never even visited England, unless you count a layover at Heathrow.

He’s long overdue for a full biography, and Dery’s book has been receiving plenty of due attention from the kinds of literary corners where Gorey was revered. Dery points out that a large proportion of Gorey’s sales have been at college bookstores, and undergraduates — with their taste for subversive erudition, lacking only something to do with it — may remain his most natural audience.

His own gifts and persona came into flower at Harvard, to which he demonstrated lifelong loyalty by wearing school scarves and inserting them into his books. Graduating in 1950, he soon settled in Manhattan, where he made a name designing and illustrating paperback books for Anchor.

It was not the most prestigious corner of the publishing industry — the idea that a soft cover could be a venue for serious literature was still novel — but as Dery notes, paperback books would become a cornerstone of popular culture for the second half of the century, and to this day there may be no more instantly recognizable paperback illustrator than Gorey.

Dery devotes welcome attention to this aspect of his career, and to the hidden-in-plain-sight queerness of Gorey’s work. As a biographer, Dery is acutely aware that his greatest challenge is addressing his subject’s sexuality. Gorey resisted any attempt to classify his sexual orientation, but as Dery points out, all his crushes were on men.

They were almost only ever crushes, because Edward Gorey seems to have died a virgin. He alluded to one or two episodes of physical intimacy that seemingly didn’t go too far, affecting utter boredom with the subject. He lived alone for his entire adult life, and never partnered. (There were a couple of intellectual soulmates who Gorey seems to have regarded as more than that, but not much more in any conventional sense of that concept.)

It may be that Gorey felt repressed — not uncommon for queer people of his generation — but Dery also acknowledges that Gorey may have been asexual, an orientation that’s only now starting to gain widespread recognition. It is possible to be a healthy human being, attracted to men or women or both, who simply does not desire sex. That’s essentially what Gorey said about himself. What exactly lay behind that, we’ll never know, but Dery is properly cautious of assuming it’s pathological.

The lack of romantic connections did free up lots of time, and Gorey used it. He produced around 100 books, most of them around 30 pages in a picture-book format that he wrote, illustrated, and designed. Starting in the early ’70s, his boutique books found far wider readership through four Amphigorey anthologies and through products like posters and mugs.

People under 40 may know Gorey simply as “the guy who drew dying children.” Children were indeed put in peril throughout his bibliography, but the book people are most likely thinking of is The Gashlycrumb Tinies, a 1963 abecedarium (Gorey loved that word, and so does Dery) of rhyming couplets that dryly list ways in which 26 children meet their ends, with causes ranging from ennui to being “run through with an awl.”

Morbid, yes, but delightfully so. Gorey’s delight in offing these kids (and various handfuls of others throughout his career) seemed to derive less from any childhood trauma of his own, although his childhood certainly wasn’t as unremarkable as he liked to day it was, than from a desire to lampoon Victorian morality plays.

Dery is also articulate in his explanation for why a book like Gashlycrumb comes across as only mildly scandalous, rather than truly tragic or deeply disturbing. A modernist taken with the absurd, Gorey saw associations (Olive, for example, with an awl) as ends in themselves. His characters don’t have inner lives, or histories: we see them in a single moment, or at best a succession of often disconnected moments. Olive, we hardly knew ye.

Gorey’s first creative products were plays, and in his final years he threw himself back into the theater, producing quirky community productions on Cape Cod, where he permanently relocated after George Balanchine died and there was no reason left to hang around in the city. (For a decade and a half, he saw virtually every performance by the New York City Ballet.)

His work never functioned as conventional narrative, though, which was precisely as he intended but kept his characters from being popularized like the Addams Family. Gorey and Charles Addams knew and liked each other, Dery notes, but neither cared for the too-easy comparison between their work. Dery’s own preference, of course, is clear: he finds Addams a little too ba-dum-dum compared to the deliberately inscrutable Gorey.

Gorey died in 2000 at age 75, having gone quickly and painlessly like he hoped. (Don’t we all?) Dery’s biography will go a long way towards properly shelving Gorey in the pantheon, but it’s also gratifyingly hesitant to peg its subject as any one thing. Individual, uncategorizable, unforgettable: not a bad epitaph, but Gorey also wrote his own.

The artist doesn’t have a tombstone (Dery explains why), but if he did, he said he’d want the inscription to read, “Oh, the of it all.” What does that even mean? Exactly.

Quite a comprehensive analysis of an eccentric, brilliant personality. The reader who approaches this biography from a scholarly point of view will appreciate the author’s treatment; others who are primarily concerned with enjoying his art may find it too detailed to get through. Well-researched but at times repetitive, this book fits best in the personal library of a reader who wishes to do far more than just skim the surface of Gorey’s enigmatic work.
I received an arc of this title from NetGalley and the publisher; this is my honest review.

I very much wanted to read this but cannot access it on my devices due to it being an acsm file! I was so disappointed and hope that it gets lots of great reviews. Thank you for the opportunity to try and review it.

'Things impermanent, incomplete: these were the sorts of things Gorey loved best.'

I was excited to learn months ago that there would be a book coming out about Edward Gorey, the man whose genius inspired the likes of Tim Burton and Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket), among others including Anna Sui. Ahead of his time, the ‘too strange and eccentric nature’ of his creations later found a wider audience, certainly with my generation and those born after. Gorey is the father of it all, a man who found beauty in ‘things withered’ as he took ‘pleasure in that which is old, faded and lonely.’ As to his sexuality, admittedly I am not interested in the speculation so much but can understand his hesitance during his time to claim homosexuality. During his youth, it certainly wasn’t a time embracing any peculiarities of arts nor any deviate from the so-called ‘norms.’ He was flamboyant in his dress, certainly it all seemed to be theater but reading about the way he kept his home, when he finally allowed someone deeper access into it, not everything was about ‘show’, with his home ever changing almost as if a stage for his entertainmen, a show for one. He seemed a man unto himself, someone who lived for his pleasures without the need to explain himself. I always find it interesting when we try to explore the sexuality of others, that it still makes people uncomfortable if someone doesn’t chose a label. Maybe it’s because I have family members who are attracted to people but aren’t (or weren’t for those now deceased) much interested in the complications of relationships, who chose to live their lives freely, to come and go as they pleased and put their time and attention into their passions, be it art, study work, travel. As well as others who once were married and when it ended invested in themselves, didn’t chose to have more relationships later in life. In fact, I see it all the time in neighbors, friends. Not everyone wants someone in their life, at their side all the time and would rather visit with friends and then go home to the quiet of their beloved solitude. Don’t confuse being sometimes alone with chosing to live as a recluse. Why is that so hard to accept? There are people who don’t really feel invested in their sexuality at all, who find their passions in other things beyond the body. Certainly the gay imagery in some of Gorey’s work fuels the whisperings that he was homosexual, as well as his own comments in interviews. There was also the earlier crush. In fact, Maurice Sendak (himself gay) met Edward Gorey and understood him, the need to hide his sexuality, as well as the struggle as an artist to be taken seriously, to become successful. Whatever his sexual preference was, Gorey was a wildly creative, fascinating, private man. Before he went to Harvard, his education was delayed by serving in the Army. It’s hard to associate the Edward we all know and love with the clean-cut military picture of one Private Gorey, circa 1943.

His childhood certainly doesn’t seem as ordinary as he led people to believe as you will read about in the chapter entitled “A Suspiciously Normal Childhood”. As the author asks, is it normal to be ‘cutting your eyeteeth on Victorian Novels’, learning to read at three? What about a grandmother’s madness? Seems he had plenty of gothic drama to fuel his future work, within his own upbringing. As this is a review, I won’t go into more, it’s in Mark Derry’s book, read it! It seems current times would have been perfect for Gorey’s talents, but maybe for someone enamored of his privacy fame would have been too itchy a coat for the man. Certainly I can imagine the shallow narcissism of our times would have been fodder for his work, even his later plays that seemed to become a bigger passion than releasing books for his fans. We can all learn so much from the pleasure Edward Gorey revelled in while creating something for the sake of doing it simply because you enjoy it and not worrying so much about the reception. In time, those naysayers will come around, which he learned years before with a certain magazine cover he landed after prior rejection. There was a lot I didn’t know about Gorey, and this book isn’t so much about revealing deep dark secrets as it’s a peek into the life of one heck of a peculiar artist, one whose macabre style was rich in texture, his shading with only a pen is incredible, his meticulousness evident with crosshatching. He had a signature style, creepy little stories that an untold number of artists have mimicked, but will we ever know the man fully? A man of biting wit, melodramatic about the smallest events and yet seemingly indifferent about the big stuff, lover of cats who he allowed free reign, even if it meant messing up work he spent hours on, contrary to his core, highly intelligent, a lover of the ballet, avid collector, a lover of things old, faded and lonely. Can we ever know even ourselves? For fans and people new to Edward Gorey, this is a wonderful read.

Available Tomorrow November 6, 2018

Little, Brown and Company

Loved it. Edward Gorey continues to be one of my favorite artists/writers. This book was great and a wonderful experience all around. Recommend to anyone learning more about the influence of Gorey. Thanks to Netgalley for an advance copy.

I am just now realizing how difficult it is to review a biography. Really, all I have to say is that this one was great. It was comprehensive and well-written, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I am really glad to have learned more about Edward Gorey, and I think this biography was the perfect way to do that. I feel like I have a better understanding of both Gorey and of the art.

Edward Gorey was an author and illustrator of eerie works such as The Ghastlycrumb Tinies and The Doubtful Guest. His unique style of art was used in the New Yorker and even as the beginning tiles to Masterpiece Theater Mystery!.  The man behind the art and story was often seen in his raccoon coat, tennis shoes, and watching the New York City ballet.

Author Mark Dery makes a man who was notorious for keeping his different social circles apart into an accessible figure in his new book Born to Be Posthumous. The book goes through his awkward childhood, time at Harvard, and through his various works and career. It also highlights his possible homosexuality and the fact he saw himself more as an asexual.  As someone who has always enjoyed the works of Edward Gorey is was interesting to see where some of the ideas came from and how some books were meant to be nonsense. 

Born to Be Posthumous is great fun to read and fascinating. It is available from Little Brown and Company on November 6th.

Unfortunately, I have been unsuccessful in downloading to my tablet, desktop or Kindle. Bummer. Is there another way to access this text? Or if no, is it available in an ARC right now?