Macabre illustrator Gorey dead at 75

Edward Gorey

April 18, 2000
Web posted at: 12:00 a.m. EDT (0400 GMT)

BOSTON (Reuters) -- Edward Gorey, whose macabre pen-and-ink drawings set somewhere between the Edwardian era and the 1920s made him one of the most distinctive American illustrators, died Saturday near his Cape Cod home, a hospital spokeswoman said Sunday.

Gorey was 75 and illustrated scores of books. He was known for black-and-white scenes of thin, wan figures inhabiting rambling old mansions and overstuffed living rooms with a theatrical feel -- including those used in the United States for the opening and closing credits on the PBS television program "Mystery."

The author of at least 90 books and illustrator of about 60 others, Gorey won acclaim for designing sets for stage productions and costumes. In 1978, he won a Tony award for costume design for the Broadway production of Dracula.

One of his best-known books was "The Gashlycrumb Tinies", an A-to-Z catalog of children dying in strange ways, starting with "A is for Amy, who fell down the stairs."

The spokeswoman at Cape Cod Hospital declined to identify the cause of death. But The New York Times reported that Gorey, who lived in a ramshackle farmhouse in Yarmouth, Massachusetts, had suffered a heart attack Wednesday.

Born in Chicago in 1925, the son of a Roman Catholic newspaperman and Episcopalian mother, who divorced when he was 11 and remarried some 14 years later, Gorey explained that the ghoulish quality of much of his work came from childhood influences.

He had read "Dracula" at age five, "Frankenstein" at age seven and all of Victor Hugo by the age of eight, he said.

"I was bored by a lot of (Frankenstein)," Gorey told the Washington Post in a 1978 interview. "It hadn't occurred to me that I could skip anything."

As a student at Harvard University, he roomed with poet Frank O'Hara. After graduating in 1950 Gorey installed himself in New York where he worked at publisher Doubleday's art department illustrating book jackets. It took some time for Gorey to find a clear direction to his life's work.

"I wanted to have my own bookstore until I worked in one," he told The Boston Globe in 1998. "Then I thought I'd be a librarian until I met some crazy ones. I hoped to get into publishing, but at 28, my parents were still helping me out. Which wasn't good at all."

In the last two years of his life, Gorey, who moved to Cape Cod in the 1980s, produced two books, "The Haunted Tea-Cosy: A Dispirited and Distasteful Diversion for Christmas" and "The Headless Bust: A Melancholy Meditation on the False Millennium."

It was not clear if there were any survivors.

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