Born to Be Posthumous, Mark Dery
Born to Be Posthumous, Mark Dery
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Born to Be Posthumous
The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey

Author: Mark Dery

Narrator: Adam Sims

Unabridged: 14 hr 48 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 12/18/2018


Synopsis

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.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Miranda

3.5 starsBut did anyone really know him? Did he even want to be known. Edward Gorey is famously infamous.Being nil, Gorey decided, was the safest policy.His work provided the scaffolding and inspiration for Neil Gaiman's Coraline, for Tim Burton's creeptacular movies, for Lemony Sn......more

Goodreads review by Jeffrey

”Only now are art critics, scholars of children’s literature, historians of book-cover design and commercial illustration, and chroniclers of the gay experience in postwar America waking up to the fact that Gorey is a critically neglected genius. His consummately original vision--expressed in virtuo......more

So, are we just all gonna ignore the fact that Dery is being acephobic? He clearly has an agenda. Page 136: "If such articles are to be believed, then 'Gorey wasn't necessarily gay, even though he was a lifelong bachelor who dressed in necklaces and furs....he was just asexual, a kind of lovable euni......more