Edward Gorey: A Biography of the Late Gothic Writer and Illustrator

Edward Gorey was an exceptional illustrator who was peerless, defied classification and has been described simultaneously as both an artist who wrote and a writer who drew. He has a cult of devotees in the millions and is known for his macabre and Victorian, Gothic crosshatch illustrations.

Edward St. John Gorey was born on February 25, 1925 in Chicago to parents Helen Dunham Garvey and Edward Lee Gorey. Gorey's childhood was nothing if not interesting as his parents divorced when he was 11 years of age, but then remarried again when he was 27.

Gorey has claimed to have inherited his illustrating and writing talents from his maternal great-grandmother, a 19th century greeting card artist, who went by the name of Helen St. John Garvey. Edward Gorey's first drawings as a one and a half year old child were of passing trains, but he has said that they were highly unimpressive and looked like irregular sausages and insists that he showed no talent whatsoever. He was also an avid reader, and finished Bram Stoker's Dracula at the age of 5.

While Edward Gorey had no formal art training, he did spend one semester at The Art Institute of Chicago in 1943. After attending the Art Institute of Chicago, Gorey spent the years 1944 to 1946 serving in the U.S. Army as a clerk for Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. Dugway Proving Ground was a place where poison gas and mortars were tested.

By the age of 20, Edward Gorey was studying as a French Literature major at Harvard where he was befriended by future poet Frank O'Hara. A fellow student at Harvard remembers Gorey as "the oddest person I've ever seen. He was very tall, with his hair plastered down across the front like bangs, like a Roman emperor."

O'Hara and Gorey were Harvard's very own dandies as they flounced about the campus pretending that they were both Oscar Wilde. They read books by Ronald Firbank, spent much time in used bookstores and decorated their campus apartment with modern white furniture which included not only a chaise lounge, but also a coffee table that was built from a tombstone taken from a local cemetery.