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Artist-author Gorey, master of the macabre, dies at 75 |
Monday, April 17, 2000
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(04-17) 06:07 PDT HYANNIS, Mass. (AP) -- Edward Gorey, whose comically macabre stories, illustrations and theater set designs were once described as ``poisonous and poetic,'' has died. He was 75. Gorey died Saturday at Cape Cod Hospital after suffering a heart attack earlier in the week. He wrote at least 90 books, illustrated 60 others and won a Tony Award in 1978 for his costume design for the Broadway production of ``Dracula.'' In the 1980s, his characters made the leap to television in the opening and closing titles of the PBS series ``Mystery!'' Gorey's stories, illustrated by line drawings in pen and ink, often showed vaguely Edwardian characters in bleak settings, reacting in prim distress to strange situations, such as the intrusion of a penguinlike, sneaker-wearing creature. The bizarre stories and illustrations reflected an elegantly macabre sense of humor. ``The Hapless Child,'' for instance, is a tale of a little girl with nice parents who winds up -- through a horrible series of misfortunes -- being kept in bondage by a drunken brute until she finally escapes. No happy ending, though: She is run over by a carriage driven by her own father, and he doesn't recognize her emaciated body as that of his daughter. Gorey was far from morbid himself, friends say. ``There was this false idea that he was a brooding, melancholic man,'' said Andreas Brown, owner of the Gotham Book Mart in Manhattan, an early champion of Gorey's work. ``He was not a recluse. He was jovial and effervescent, and he loved to laugh.'' Brown has called Gorey ``the Edward Lear of the 20th century,'' a reference to the English artist who wrote and illustrated ``The Owl and the Pussycat'' and other rhymes. Critic Edmund Wilson described the world created in Gorey's work as ``poisonous and poetic.'' His early work included a set of illustrations published in 1963 under the title ``The Vinegar Works; Three Volumes of Moral Instruction.'' They featured a grisly alphabet book, ``The Gashlycrumb Tinies,'' in which ``A is for Amy who fell down the stairs, B is for Basil assaulted by bears, C is for Clara who wasted away, D is for Desmond thrown out of a sleigh. ...'' The book was included in ``Amphigorey,'' an anthology of 15 stories published in 1972 by Putnam, that brought Gorey's work to a wider audience. It was followed by ``Amphigorey Too'' in 1974 and ``Amphigorey Also'' in 1983. ``To take my work seriously would be the height of folly,'' Gorey told The Associated Press in 1994. Gorey initially tried to be a novelist, but eventually to the smaller books on which he built his career. He also designed sets and costumes for a number of theater productions, and staged his own ``Gorey Stories'' in New York in 1978. In the 1980s, Gorey moved to Cape Cod, where he led a small theater troupe that performed his works in plays and puppet shows. ^------= On the Net: Gorey gallery and list of works: http://www.goreyography.com Edward Gorey Bibliography, a fan site: http://www.fearofdolls.com/gorey.html
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