11 Fascinating Facts About Edward Gorey

Edward Gorey is best remembered for his distinctive art style: His darkly humorous pen-and-ink drawings led to him being dubbed the “Granddaddy of Goth.” But Gorey’s macabre imagination wasn’t just limited to illustrations; he was also a prolific author, a costume designer, and even a puppet maker. In honor of what would have been Gorey’s 100th birthday on February 22 (he died at the age of 75 on April 15, 2000), here are 11 facts about his fascinating life and works.

1. Edward Gorey taught himself to read when he was just 3 years old.
2. It’s estimated that Gorey illustrated more than 500 book covers.
3. Gorey published 116 of his own books.
4. The Gashlycrumb Tinies became a breakout success.
5. Gorey used a variety of anagrams of his name as pseudonyms for some of his books.
6. Gorey created his own publishing imprint.
7. He won a Tony award for working on a theatrical adaptation of Dracula.
8. Gorey was also involved in creating other plays—sometimes featuring hand puppets.
9. The opening and closing title sequences and set of the PBS show Mystery! featured Gorey’s art.
10. Gorey’s art inspired other famous creatives.
11. In his will, Gorey left his estate to animal charities.

Edward Gorey taught himself to read when he was just 3 years old.

Young Gorey was a prodigy when it came to reading—he taught himself how to read before even starting elementary school (he then went on to skip a few grades). When most kids were working their way through A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh with the help of their parents, Gorey was flying through horror classics. He read Bram Stoker’s Dracula when he was 5, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein at 7, and had polished off the works of Victor Hugo by the time he was 8. “I was bored by a lot of {Frankenstein},” he later told The Washington Post. “It hadn’t occurred to me that I could skip anything.”

It’s estimated that Gorey illustrated more than 500 book covers.

Gorey initially earned his living as a book cover illustrator for Doubleday Anchor. He went on to illustrate covers for Bobbs-Merrill and Random House’s Looking Glass Library, and started working as a freelance illustrator in the early ’60s. Among the more than 500 titles he illustrated are heavy hitters like H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, Dracula, and Charles Dickens’s Bleak House.

Gorey published 116 of his own books.

In 1953, the same year that he was hired by Doubleday, Gorey published his first book, The Unstrung Harp—and although he didn’t achieve instant acclaim as an author, he did start gaining a cult following. His books are filled with his signature vaguely Victorian/Edwardian black-and-white fine-lined illustrations. In a 1984 interview, Gorey said that his “mission in life is to make everybody as uneasy as possible {…} because that’s what the world is like.” In addition to experimenting with content—from the sexually suggestive but non-explicit images of The Curious Sofa to the combination of murder and opera in The Blue Aspic—Gorey also played with the physical form of his books, creating miniatures and pop-ups.

Today, Gorey’s most popular works include The Doubtful Guest, which sees a penguin-like creature cause mischief at a manor house, and The Gashlycrumb Tinies, an abecedarium that goes through the alphabet via the deaths of children—e.g., “A is for AMY who fell down the stairs. B is for BASIL assaulted by bears.” Speaking of …

The Gashlycrumb Tinies became a breakout success.

When The Gashlycrumb Tinies was first published in 1963, it was included as part of a set—called The Vinegar Works—alongside The Insect God and The West Wing, but it soon surpassed those two titles in popularity and went on to become Gorey’s most famous work. Gorey’s drawings have been put on merchandise, and the book has inspired numerous artists to create their own versions—from a Game of Thrones parody to a video game character spin on the idea.

Gorey said he was originally inspired by “those 19th century cautionary tales, I guess, though my book is punishment without misbehavior.” It took him roughly a day to ink each deathly drawing (though, because he still had a day job, most were started one day and finished the next). As for Gorey’s favorite page in the book, he said, “I did think at the time that ‘N is for Neville who died of ennui’ was rather fetching.”

Gorey used a variety of anagrams of his name as pseudonyms for some of his books.

“About the time my first book was published over forty years ago, I found my name lent itself to an edifying number of anagrams,” Gorey explained. He decided to run with this and published some of his books under anagrams of his name. Here are just a few examples: Ogdred Weary is the pen name used for The Curious Sofa, Regera Dowdy wrote The Pious Infant and Garrod Weedy penned The Pointless Book.

Gorey created his own publishing imprint.

Gorey was struggling to get his own books published, so in 1962, he solved the problem by creating his own small imprint: Fantod Press. (Fantod is an archaic word meaning “a state of irritability, anxiety, or fidgets.”) He ended up publishing 28 of his books through this press, beginning with The Beastly Baby (under the pen name Ogred Weary). Gorey was good friends with the owners of Gotham Book Mart, Frances Steloff, and her successor Andreas Brown, and so was able to sell his books in their store. His art was also often displayed in the bookstore’s gallery.

He won a Tony award for working on a theatrical adaptation of Dracula.

In 1973, producer John Wulp hired Gorey to design the sets and costumes for his theatrical revival of Dracula (the last time it had been on stage—more than 20 years earlier—Bela Lugosi played the Count). The production in Nantucket, Massachusetts, was a success. In 1977, producer Eugene Wolsk staged the play on Broadway with Frank Langella in the lead role. Gorey was rehired to design not only the show’s Broadway posters and playbills but also its merchandise. The production ended up running for three years and eventually starred Raul Julia as the villainous vampire.

Gorey won the 1978 Tony for Best Costume Design, but he wasn’t there to receive the award in person because he had instead chosen to go to the ballet that night. Gorey was also nominated for Best Scenic Design, and the production won Most Innovative Production of a Revival.

With the royalties he earned from Dracula, Gorey bought a house on Cape Cod, which he lived in until his death and is now a museum called the Edward Gorey House. “It’s the house that Dracula built,” says Gregory Hischak, the museum’s director.

Gorey was also involved in creating other plays—sometimes featuring hand puppets.

Dracula wasn’t Gorey’s only foray into theater; fresh out of Harvard, he wrote, directed, and worked on sets for the Poets’ Theatre, and he also wrote and designed sets for the 1994 off-Broadway show Amphigorey, The Musicale. Gorey was also very involved with local theater productions on Cape Cod. “I write, I direct, I design, I do everything. I even act if something happens to somebody in the cast,” he said. Some of the plays which he was involved in were hand puppet shows. In addition to writing his own scripts for his hand-crafted puppets and their puppeteers to perform, he also staged adaptations of works by famous playwrights, including Shakespeare and Seneca.

The opening and closing title sequences and set of the PBS show Mystery! featured Gorey’s art.

Mystery! was a PBS crime and mystery anthology show that ran from 1980 to 2006. The opening and closing titles were animated vignettes created from Gorey’s illustrations, while the set—which host Vincent Price called “Gorey Manor”—also featured his artistic touch. Despite clearly coming from Gorey’s mind and hand, he takes little responsibility for the finished sequences. “I gave them a scenario for the credits, but they said, ‘Thank you very much, dear, but this will take half an hour,’ ” he later explained. “I told them it wouldn’t if they put it on at a reasonable rate of speed, but they didn’t seem to care for that idea very much. So {animator} Derek Lamb or somebody concocted the final scenario, and I had very little to do with it.”

Gorey’s art inspired other famous creatives.

Author Lemony Snicket (the pen name of Daniel Handler) said that he sent Gorey the first two books in the A Series of Unfortunate Events series with “a note saying how much I admired his work and how much I hoped that he would forgive what I had stolen from him.” Writer Neil Gaiman described his dark children’s novella Coraline (2002) as “a Gorey story” and even penned his own version of a macabre abecedarium, The Dangerous Alphabet (2008), illustrated by Gris Grimly. Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro called his Gothic romance Crimson Peak (2015) a “blood stained valentine” to Gorey. And although director Tim Burton hasn’t been vocal about Gorey’s influence on his style, Hischak believes that “it’s pretty darn obvious.”

In his will, Gorey left his estate to animal charities.

Gorey loved cats—he always had at least one and once lived with seven feline friends—and was passionate about animal welfare, so it’s no surprise that what he died in 2000 of a heart attack he left his estate to various animal charities. The profits generated by the Edward Gorey House are donated to a wide range of animal welfare charities—covering cats (of course), dogs, birds, bats, elephants, sea turtles, seals, and more—as is the money raised by the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust, which licenses and lends out his work.

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