About
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.
• FIRST TRUE BIOGRAPHY OF A CULT FIGURE: Today, the reclusive and legendarily eccentric Edward Gorey, who died in 2000, is more famous than ever, the subject of an obsessive fandom whose ranks have been swelling steadily since his death and are now approaching mainstream proportions. Gorey has influenced a generation of writers and artists, including Neil Gaiman, Tim Burton, Lemony Snicket, Ransom Riggs and Alison Bechdel. Incredibly, no true biography of this fascinatingly eccentric, mysterious genius has been published. Clearly, the time for such a book is now.
• EXCLUSIVE RESEARCH AND INTERVIEWS: This truly is the definitive book on Gorey, and will likely remain so for decades. Stemming from a piece in the New York Times, Dery has spent eight years working on the book, and has conducted exclusive interviews with Gorey's family, along with John Ashbery, Donald Hall, Lemony Snicket, Neil Gaiman, and Anna Sui.
• CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED: We have some fantastic pre-pub quotes from the likes of Jonathan Lethem, Alison Bechdel and Caitlin Doughty. Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, has called Born to be Posthumous 'a genius book about a bookish genius'. We're also hoping for an endorsement from Neil Gaiman.
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.
• FIRST TRUE BIOGRAPHY OF A CULT FIGURE: Today, the reclusive and legendarily eccentric Edward Gorey, who died in 2000, is more famous than ever, the subject of an obsessive fandom whose ranks have been swelling steadily since his death and are now approaching mainstream proportions. Gorey has influenced a generation of writers and artists, including Neil Gaiman, Tim Burton, Lemony Snicket, Ransom Riggs and Alison Bechdel. Incredibly, no true biography of this fascinatingly eccentric, mysterious genius has been published. Clearly, the time for such a book is now.
• EXCLUSIVE RESEARCH AND INTERVIEWS: This truly is the definitive book on Gorey, and will likely remain so for decades. Stemming from a piece in the New York Times, Dery has spent eight years working on the book, and has conducted exclusive interviews with Gorey's family, along with John Ashbery, Donald Hall, Lemony Snicket, Neil Gaiman, and Anna Sui.
• CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED: We have some fantastic pre-pub quotes from the likes of Jonathan Lethem, Alison Bechdel and Caitlin Doughty. Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, has called Born to be Posthumous 'a genius book about a bookish genius'. We're also hoping for an endorsement from Neil Gaiman.