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

"The definitive biography of Edward Gorey, the eccentric master of macabre nonsense.

From The Gashlycrumb Tinies to The Doubtful Guest, Edward Gorey's wickedly funny and deliciously sinister little books have influenced our culture in innumerable ways, from the works of Tim Burton and Neil Gaiman to Lemony Snicket. Some even call him the Grandfather of Goth.

But who was this man, who lived with over twenty thousand books and six cats, who roomed with Frank O'Hara at Harvard, and was known--in the late 1940s, no less--to traipse around in full-length fur coats, clanking bracelets, and an Edwardian beard? An eccentric, a gregarious recluse, an enigmatic auteur of whimsically morbid masterpieces, yes--but who was the real Edward Gorey behind the Oscar Wildean pose?

He published over a hundred books and illustrated works by Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, Edward Lear, John Updike, Charles Dickens, Hilaire Belloc, Muriel Spark, Bram Stoker, Gilbert & Sullivan, and others. At the same time, he was a deeply complicated and conflicted individual, a man whose art reflected his obsessions with the disquieting and the darkly hilarious.

Based on newly uncovered correspondence and interviews with personalities as diverse as John Ashbery, Donald Hall, Lemony Snicket, Neil Gaiman, and Anna Sui, Born to be Posthumous draws back the curtain on the eccentric genius and mysterious life of Edward Gorey."

I know you're like me and need more Edward Gorey in your life. ALWAYS.

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?

This should be the last place you start your experience of Edward Gorey. Not because this book is bad, in fact it is quite good, but in order to appreciate this biography you really must be familiar with Gorey's work. And when I say familiar, I mean more than just having read the Gashlycrumb Tinies. Gorey was a many out of time and place but also of a conglomeration of particulars, and Mark Dery does an admirable job illustrating the man who really was, and wanted to be, an enigma. There is some pop-psychoanalyzing and some application of various social theories, but they are minimal and don't really detract from the book. Dery does spend much time reviewing particular works of Gorey's in relation to the period of life he was in - this can be quite frustrating IF you are not quite familiar with Gorey's work. Gorey was a man devoted to his interests and obsessions, so in addition to a biography of Gorey, this book is also very much a biography of things, the things with Gorey loved (Balanchine) or at least which held his attention for sustained periods of time (Buffy). It is interesting to note that Frank O'Hara figures as a major figure in this work, however, in biographies of O'Hara (City Poet being an example) Gorey barely gets a mention. It does make one wonder if that is due to the fullness of O'Hara's social circle or the O'Hara biographers just don't know how to approach Gorey. Dery includes O'Hara (and many other Gorey friends and infatuations) in amazing depth - for a many who had a very unique social life Dery has been able to make very interesting connections and discoveries. IF you love Edward Gorey, this is worth a read. "Oh, the of it all."