Edward Gorey

Edward Gorey
In the kitchen of his home at Yarmouth, Cape Cod, 1999
Born	Edward St. John Gorey (1925-02-22)February 22, 1925 Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Died	April 15, 2000(2000-04-15) (aged 75) Cape Cod Hospital, Hyannis, Massachusetts, U.S.
Nationality	American
Education	Mainly self-taught; briefly: The School of The Art Institute of Chicago
Known for	Writer, Illustrator, Poet
Notable work	The Gashlycrumb Tinies, The Doubtful Guest, Animation introducing Mystery! on PBS
Movement	Literary nonsense, Surrealism
Awards	Tony Award (costume design); Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis (writing)

Edward St. John Gorey (February 22, 1925 – April 15, 2000) was an American writer and artist noted for his illustrated books. His characteristic pen-and-ink drawings often depict vaguely unsettling narrative scenes in Victorian and Edwardian settings.

Edward St. John Gorey was born in Chicago. His parents, Helen Dunham (née Garvey) and Edward Lee Gorey, divorced in 1936 when he was 11, then remarried in 1952 when he was 27. One of his stepmothers was Corinna Mura (1909–1965), a cabaret singer who had a small role in the classic film Casablanca as the woman playing the guitar while singing "La Marseillaise" at Rick's Café Américain. His father was briefly a journalist. Gorey's maternal great-grandmother, Helen St. John Garvey, was a popular nineteenth-century greeting card writer and artist, from whom he claimed to have inherited his talents.

Gorey attended a variety of local grade schools and then the Francis W. Parker School. He spent 1944 to 1946 in the Army at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. 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.

In the early 1950s, Gorey, with a group of recent Harvard alumni including Alison Lurie (1947), John Ashbery (1949), Donald Hall (1951) and Frank O'Hara, amongst others, founded the Poets' Theatre in Cambridge, which was supported by Harvard faculty members John Ciardi and Thornton Wilder.

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.