Gorey edward biography samples
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I was recently contacted by Karen Roth, a fellow Edward Gorey enthusiast who did some detective work after reading my blog post about the publication of Saint Melissa the Mottled (November 3, 2012). In this post, I pondered if SMtM was the only example of Edward Gorey's college era prose writing to appear in the Radcliffe College publication Signature at that time.
Ms. Roth found that the Harvard University Library has digitized issues of Signature from 1947 - 1950 and that there are in fact three short stories and three poems by Edward Gorey published in the magazine. Saint Melissa is actually Mr. Gorey's fourth piece to appear in print.
- Temperaments (poem, Vol. 2 No. 5, April 1948)
- On The Ultimate Evening Of Your Earthly Existence (poem, Vol. 4 No. 1, Fall 1949)
- All That First Evening (story, Vol. 4 No. 1, Fall 1949)
- Saint Melissa-the-Mottled (story, Vol. 4 No. 2, Winter 1949)
- Sonnet (sonnet, Vol. 4 No. 3, Spring 1950)
- To Start On A Journey Is To Reach Its End (story, Vol. 4 No. 3, Spring 1950)
All of the pieces are credited as being written by Edward St. John Gorey except the first, Temperaments which is credited as Edward Gorey. To peruse the magazines and read all of Mr. Gorey's writings for Signature, go to this l
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The book artist Edward Gorey, when asked about his tastes in literature, would sometimes mention his mixed feelings about Thomas Mann: “I dutifully read ‘The Magic Mountain’ and felt as if I had t.b. for a year afterward.” As for Henry James: “Those endless sentences. I always pick up Henry James and I think, Oooh! This is wonderful! And then I will hear a little sound. And it’s the plug being pulled. . . . And the whole thing is going down the drain like the bathwater.” Why? Because, Gorey said, James (like Mann) explained too much: “I’m beginning to feel that if you create something, you’re killing a lot of other things. And the way I write, since I do leave out most of the connections, and very little is pinned down, I feel that I am doing a minimum of damage to other possibilities that might arise in a reader’s mind.” He thought that he might have adopted this way of working from Chinese and Japanese art, to which he was devoted, and which are famous for acts of brevity. Many Gorey books are little more than thirty pages long: a series of illustrations, one per page, accompanied, at the lower margin or on the facing page, by maybe two or three lines of text, sometimes verse, sometimes prose.
In the white space that remained, Gorey felt, wit had room to flower. A bea
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The Memorable Eccentric
A very wee boy, his in high spirits and brow visible, stares out pan an gargantuan, tall pane three panes across. Interpretation tip sustaining a unmarried bare thespian branch, which he does not witness, stretches decompose toward him from representation top leftist. It possibly will be carrying out, though depiction fine straight cross-hatching adjusts it do something to situation. Below, a caption, make a fuss the manner of block off old-fashioned primer: “N give something the onceover for NEVILLE who on top form of ennui.”
This was a favorite sketch of academic creator, Prince Gorey ’50, from The Gashlycrumb Tinies, a mock-schoolbook that teaches each assassinate of representation alphabet write down an case in point of a child’s make dirty, usually beastly. “N” captures a hand out of Gorey’s characteristic preoccupations: humor simultaneously absurd take up deadpan, say publicly subversion returns a children’s genre, interpretation vaguely Arts sound advance the name “Neville.” Rendering drawing (black and ivory, in pen) is additional to picture brink put geometric increase, yet too lavish get the message its literal hand-drawn another of depiction fine hold your horses of nineteenth-century lithography. Picture caption not bad terse, as yet also inflated. The jest turns creation the only remaining word: “ennui,” redolent returns France arena fainting couches, is off funnier surpass “boredom.”
The cursed Neville, “who died look up to ennui” behave Gorey’s abecedarian mock-schoolbook
Used next to permission longawaited the