Edward Gorey

Based just on his art, you might imagine Edward Gorey as a dour Englishman, with the peak of his career sometime in the 1920s or '30s, whose childhood was marked with a series of tragic deaths. But Gorey was none of these things.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com k Low and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fine. Once you
have read some of Edward Gorey's books, it is almost

(00:22):
impossible to mistake his work for anyone else's, unless maybe
they are intentionally working in the style of Edward gory
His black and white pen and ink illustrations look almost
like engravings. They're just full of hatching and cross hatching.
The words are lettered by hand, and the stories a
lot of times unfold through either rhyming couplets or limericks

(00:43):
or some of their verse. The plots a lot of
times and really ambiguously, or they never resolve at all.
It's this gloomy, foreboding, typically Edwardian world that's populated by
bats and cats and odd creatures and grown ups who
are usually in very glamorous clothing, and a lot of

(01:05):
children who somehow come to harm. And one of one
of his most well known books, which is an alphabet
book called The Gashly Curbs, Tiny's m is for Maud
who was swept out to see n is for Neville
who died of Anu. The other Tinese are and assaulted
by bears. There sucks dry by leeches, there run through

(01:27):
with alls. It's all very darkly whimsical. So if you
don't know much about Edward Gorey's life, you might imagine
the person who did this to be a dour Englishman
with the peak of his career, maybe sometime in the
nineties or thirties, whose own childhood was marked with a
series of tragic deaths. But Edward Gorey was none of

(01:50):
those things. No, he's delightful. He's who were going to
talk about today. Edward Gory, nicknamed Ted, was born Edward st.
John Ory on February twenty s in Chicago, Illinois. He
was the only child of Edward Leo Gory and Helen Garvey,
who divorced when he was eleven. His father later remarried

(02:12):
singer and guitarist Karina Mura, who was most well known
for being the guitar player at Rick's Cafe America in
the movie Casablanca. Gory's parents remarried one another in nineteen
fifty two. Already it's kind of whimsical and cooky. The
family had predominantly Irish roots, with ancestors on both sides,

(02:34):
immigrating to the United States in the mid to late
nineteenth century. Although his father was Roman Catholic and his
mother was Episcopalian, gory himself wasn't particularly religious, and later
on in his life he would say that if he
was anything, he was a Taoist. He was also quite precocious,
and he started drawing before he was even two years old.

(02:54):
His oldest surviving drawing, called the Sausage Train, is of
the trains that passed his grandparents house in Chicago, and
he drew that when he was about eighteen months old.
This is full of oblong shapes that are recognizably trains,
but they were also very definitely drawn by a small child.
So it's not like he just whipped out realistic drawings
and people went wonderkin, No, I mean it's uh. It

(03:18):
is starting startling lye adept for an eighteen month old,
but still obviously a child's drawing. By three, Edward Gorey
had taught himself to read, and by five or six,
sometimes he says he would say seven and interviews buried
a little bit. He had read two books whose influence
on his own work is really obvious Alice in Wonderland

(03:39):
and Dracula. So if you ever read an Edward Gory
book and said, man, this is like if Alice in
Wonderland had a baby with Dracula, you were exactly right.
That was right. And although Gory described his upbringing as
very ordinary Midwestern childhood, in reality he moved around a lot.
By the time he left for college, he had had

(04:00):
at least twelve different addresses, including staying with relatives in
Florida for a brief stretch after his parents divorce. He
was overall a good student, and he was bright enough
that he skipped first grade, but sometimes after changing schools,
his work would waver a little as he adjusted to
a new environment. By eighth grade, Gorey was drawing illustrations

(04:22):
for the school yearbook, as well as participating in typing club,
art club, Shakespeare Club, and glee club, along with serving
as assembly president. He also, sometime in those years learned
to play the piano. The most stable period of Gorey's
education before college was when he was at Chicago's Francis W.

(04:43):
Parker School. He enrolled there in the ninth grade and
he graduated on June five, and while there he was
clearly interested in art, hanging out with a click of
other artistically inclined students and participating in his first school
art show in nineteen thirty nine. Reportedly, his senior yearbook
had no photo of him, but a blank spot where

(05:06):
he'd draw himself in when people asked. Gory was offered
several college scholarships when he graduated from high school, but
World War Two was underway by the time he got
out of school and he was drafted into the United
States Army. He was only able to take a couple
of classes at the Art Institute of Chicago before reporting
for duty. From nineteen forty three until after the end

(05:28):
of the war, he served Stateside as a clerk, spending
most of those years at doug Way Proving Grounds in Utah.
This was a testing ground for biological and chemical weapons
and their countermeasures. Gory did not talk a whole lot
about his World War Two service, although when it did
come up in interviews, he virtually always mentioned the Dugway

(05:49):
sheep incident, which took place much later. That was in
nineteen sixty eight incident in which thousands of sheep were
killed in western Utah, purportedly by nerve agents from the sility.
But it was while in the military that Gory started
writing plays as a way to occupy his time. After
being discharged from the army, Gory enrolled at Harvard, which

(06:11):
was paid for by the g I Bill, where he
majored not in art but in French literature. Even though
he wasn't majoring in art, he continued to both write
and draw. He published poems and stories in the campus
magazine Signature, as well as illustrating for the magazine and
for other publications. At Harvard, Gorey became friends and for

(06:32):
a couple of years roommates with poet Frank O'Hara. They
decked out their dorm suite with rented furniture and they
made it into their own little salon. Poet Donald Hall,
another Harvard graduate, is quoted in Harvard Magazine is saying
quote they gave the best parties. O'Hara was definitely the
bigger partier of the two young men, though, so they
eventually drifted apart a bit uh and this would be

(06:54):
an ongoing theme in Gory's life. He was charming and
generous once you got close to him, but he often
preferred to be more solitary than social. Gory graduated from
Harvard in ninety and he stayed in Cambridge, Massachusetts for
a couple of years after that, working in bookstores and
helping to start the Poets Theater. The Poets Theaters founders

(07:16):
and original members were all students or recent graduates from Harvard,
including Alison Lurie, John Ashbury, and Donald Hall. They would
stage their own and revival works of poetic drama. Even
though he had been writing poems and since high school
and plays since his time in the Army, a lot
of Gorey's work with the Poets Theater was more as

(07:37):
an artist and a designer for both the stage and
the productions. Programs and promotional materials. You can still see
like scans of old programs that he drew in these years.
Immediately after he graduated, Gory stayed in Massachusetts for a
couple of years, mainly working part time in bookstores, before
he made the move to New York City. And that

(07:57):
marked a huge shift in his life and career. And
we're going to talk about that more after we paused
for a sponsor break. While Edward Gorey liked his work
with The Poets Theater he wasn't able to support himself
working part time at Cambridge Bookstores. In late nineteen two,

(08:20):
he designed a couple of book covers as a freelancer
for Barbara's Zimmerman and Jason Epstein, who he knew from Harvard.
Epstein soon offered him a job at the art department
at Double Day Anchor in New York City. He started
out doing paste up and corrections of other people's work,
and eventually started designing book covers. He was good at it,

(08:41):
and he was efficient, which left him time to work
on his own projects and to do additional work as
a commercial illustrator. In his own work, he was primarily
drawing in black and white because he knew from his
day job that it would be hard to find a
publisher for full color illustrated books at the time. But
the covers that he was drawn while at Anchor usually
were in color, often with subtle muted tones. There are

(09:04):
people who have written the whole papers about Edward Gorey's
use of color on the book covers he was drawing
for publishers, especially since his own his own books are
so often in black and white. Gory's first book, which
was the Unstrung Harp or Mr Earbrass writes. A novel
came out in nineteen fifty three. This is about a

(09:27):
frustrated man trying to write a novel. It's the closest
to an autobiographical work, probably of of all of his work.
The Listing Addict followed in nineteen fifty four. Neither of
these books sold particularly well, though, and later on Gorey
bought up copies that he found on remainder tables to
give them his front to friends as presence. Soon after

(09:48):
moving to New York, Gorey found one of his truly
great loves, and that was the New York City Ballet,
under the helm of its founder, George Balanchine. Gory had
been to the ballet before, he had gone as a
child in Chicago, but after attending a few performances in
the ninety three season, he started attending more and more

(10:09):
of Balanchine's productions, until starting in n he was attending
literally every performance. This took dedication, apart from the obvious
that that is a lot of ballet to his hand.
At Christmas time, it meant attending nearly forty performances of
The Nutcracker. I read an interview with him, where the

(10:31):
interviewer was like, please explain this to me. How are
you able to sit through thirty nine performances of The Nutcracker.
Here's why I'm laughing so hard. I feel like, should
one day someone attempted to write a biography of me,
they would be like, and she saw Star Wars thirty
seven times in a theater, So I understand a little bit.

(10:54):
How you could go see The Nutcracker forty times in
a row. Well, it was forty times in a row
for like years and years in a row. Like he
did it every season, and then he saved all of
his ticket stubs from all of these trips to the ballet.
He loved ballet so much that in seventy he wrote
The Lavender Leotard, or Going a Lot to the New
York City Ballet. Then this initially came out in play

(11:17):
bill as part of the celebration for the ballet's fiftieth anniversary.
When The Lavender Leotard came out as its own standalone book,
Edward Gory hand painted covers for its first run. Addition,
because the printer had not been able to match the
exact right shade of lavender, this is how dedicated he
was to the New York City Ballet. I love him

(11:39):
so much. Gory wrote one other book explicitly about ballet
during his career, The Gilded Bat, which came out in
nineteen sixty six, but the influence of ballet is clear
in his other works as well. The people he draws
often have turned out toes elongated, extended poses, and even
when something terrible is happening to them, a sort of

(12:00):
graceful presence on the page. On nights when Gory wasn't
going to the New York City Ballet, he was often
at the opera or the movies, and he became a
very recognizable presence around New York City. He typically wore
a full length fur coat over jeans, the shirt and
converse sneakers, and he wore a lot of very heavy jewelry,

(12:21):
especially rings, a lot of which was made out of
iron or brass. He was a very recognizable person. So
if you want to throw together a fun Halloween costume,
go as Edward Gorey. It's a pretty easy one to
put together, and it's kind of nerdy and cool. He
also started accumulating the books that would eventually grow into
his own personal library. During this time. He loved to read,

(12:43):
and he tended to come back home with a book
anytime he left the house. A particular favorite was Agatha Christie,
who he had been reading and rereading since childhood. He
also loved Jane Austen, describing her as his idol. Another
favorite was Anthony Trollop, although he did not read his
at Trollop's work very much as he got older. He
also loved poetry, particularly the work of W. H. Auden.

(13:07):
He did not love everything he read, though, and he
was very candid about authors and actors and anyone else
that he did not particularly like. So he made no
secret of the fact that he despised nearly everything by
Henry James, in spite of the fact that he had
drawn the cover art for some of Henry James's books.

(13:29):
There's a little sign in the Edward Gory House today
that says, please know Henry James and the Edward Gory House.
I love it so much. Gory's New York City apartment
also became home to a number of cats, many of
them named after characters in Murasaki Shikibu's eleventh century Japanese
novel The Tale of Genji, another lifelong favorite work of literature.

(13:53):
Throughout this time in New York City, Gory was writing
and illustrating his own books. Even though most people remember
were him for his art, he really thought of himself
as a writer first. With every line, he would think,
can this make a drawing? But he didn't actually start
illustrating until he was satisfied with the words, and he
revised as he went. He would get one sentence exactly

(14:14):
right before he moved on to the next one. In
ninety seven, Double Day published Gorries The Doubtful Guest, which
carries a lot of the hallmarks of his later work.
A peculiar guest who looks a little like a penguin
shows up at a mansion inhabited by a family that
looks somewhere between Victorian and Edwardian. Whatever it is, the

(14:35):
guest is ill mannered and weird, and it has been
bothering the family for seventeen years. At the end of
the book, The Very Strange The object Lesson came out
a year later. I tried to figure out how to
sum up the object Lesson in a sentence. It's not
really possible. Involved like some tongs and prosthetic leg it's

(14:59):
there's a so's it's very surreal. It's one of the
things that people point to when they talk about surrealist
influences on Edward Gorey. So in nineteen fifty nine, The
Doubtful Guest caught the eye of Edmund Wilson. He wrote
about it in an article called the Albums of Edward
Gorey in the December issue of The New Yorker. This
brought Edward Gory a lot more attention than he had before,

(15:22):
and it was the first time a lot of people
had ever heard of him, although at this point he
was creating so many book covers for Double Day Anchor
that they had almost certainly seen something he had drawn before.
Ninety nine was also when Gory left Double Day Anchor
to serve as art director at Looking Glass Library, which
set out to repackage classic works for children. In addition

(15:46):
to being the art director, he helped select some of
the twenty eight books that were ultimately published, and he
did illustrations for a few of them. The most famous
was his illustrated War of the Worlds, which came out
in nineteen sixty. He also illustrated a of ghost stories
called The Haunted looking Glass, and he also chose the
stories themselves for that one. Looking Glass Library folded in

(16:08):
nineteen sixty two, and Gory started doing some work for
other publishers as well as working freelance, including designing advertisements.
He also started granting permission for his existing illustrations to
be used in other work. One example from later in
his career is an end of life planning booklet called
Before I Go You Should Know My Funeral and Final Plans,

(16:30):
which was distributed by Funeral Consumers Alliance. It sort of
seems perfect for Edward Gorey to have. Also in nineteen
sixty two, the much beloved The Gashly Crumb Chinese debuted
as part of a three volume work called The Vinegar
Works Three Volumes of Moral Instruction, which also included The

(16:50):
Insect God and The West Wing. The Gashly Crumb Chinese
has never been out of print. That same year, nineteen
sixty two was a big year Edward Gory and Francis
Steloff launched the fantod Press. Stelloff was founder of the
Gotham Bookmark, which was a bookstore in Literary Haven that
had become the primary distribution point for a lot of

(17:12):
Corey's work. Gotham Bookmark is where Gory sat to hand
paint all those copies of the Lavender Leotard, and when
it opened an art gallery in n seven, he was
one of its first exhibitors. Gory and Steeloff launched Fantad
Press together because Gorey had trouble finding a publisher for
a lot of what he had written, and he wanted

(17:32):
a way to publish it himself. The press's first book
was The Beastly Baby, which was the first work Gory
had ever tried to publish. It was one of the
many books that came out under a pseudonym that was
an anagram or near anagram of Gorey's own name, in
this case Agdred Weary. The Beastly Baby features a big, sticky, shrieking,

(17:53):
gurgling baby that does horrible things like burn the upholstery
with acid. According to Gory, it made people so angry
that mothers tore it up and mailed the pieces back
to him. I have always contended that seeing this book
as a kid is one of the reasons I never
wanted children. In the late nineteen sixties, Gory started spending
more time on Cape Cod Massachusetts, transporting his cats with

(18:17):
him back and forth between their in New York City.
He was always in New York during ballet season, but
eventually he would move out to the Cape permanently. We
were going to talk about that after another quick sponsor break.
Edward Gorey had relatives who lived on Cape Cod, so

(18:39):
he had visited there from time to time over the years.
As he started to spend more time there in the
sixties and seventies, he got involved in local theaters all
along the Cape, designing promotional materials and costumes, staging work
of his own, some of it quite experimental. He continued
to do some of the same work in New York
City as well. In nineteen seventy three, Gorey designed the

(19:02):
set for a production of Dracula that was to be
staged on Nantucket, off the coast of Cape Cod. When
he was drawing for books, Gorey usually worked at about
the same size as the finished printed product. For this set,
which looks like a black and white cross hatched illustration
from one of his books, he drew larger images that
were then blown up for the stage. This same staging

(19:25):
opened on Broadway on October twenty nine, seventy seven, where
it ran until January. Of night. It was nominated for
three Tony Awards, one for the sets and the costumes,
which which Gorey had also designed, and he was also
It was also nominated for Best Revival. Gory won the
Tony for his costume work and the production also won

(19:47):
the Tony for Best Revival. But always really bothered him
that the sets had not one as well. They are
quite striking. It's one of those things that happens, where
are you shrug where it doesn't make sense. We see
it all the time. Apparently it rankled him, but I
can understand that. A musical adaptation of Gory's own work,

(20:08):
Gory Stories, appeared on Broadway in nineteen seventy eight after
getting its start at the University of Kentucky, and Gory
adored this production, which had a brief run off Broadway
in January and February, along with sixteen previews. It officially
opened on Broadway on October and it closed the very
same night. The New York Times and Daily News had

(20:30):
been on strike for months and it just had not
gotten much publicity. There's there are, of course, other stagings
of Gory's work or place he was related with, But
Dracula on Broadway and Gory Stories are the two Broadway productions.
Gory spent more and more time on Cape Cod In
the late nineteen seventies and early nineteen eighties. He started

(20:52):
easing up on his patronage of the New York City
Ballet as George Balanchine started passing some of his leadership
onto his successors. When Balantine died in three Gory decided
it was time to think about leaving New York entirely.
At first, he moved to Barnstable, Massachusetts, where he stayed
in a house belonging to relatives. Then he moved into

(21:14):
a two hundred year old sea captain's home in Yarmouthport
that he bought with his Dracula royalties, and he nicknamed
it the Elephant House. The Elephant House became home to Gory,
his cats, and his collections for the rest of his life.
In terms of cats, he typically had five or six.
He thought six cats were a lot harder to keep

(21:34):
up with than five, and seven was far too many.
This is exactly my numbers. Six is where I'm maxed out.
Five is kind of perfect. He had a whole thing
about when when there are six cats, they somehow formed
this phalanx of cat and then five is like not
not having so much of a supernatural level of combined

(21:57):
cat intelligence. But seven is right out in my experience,
this is all entirely accurate. Uh. And for collections, moving
from a tiny New York apartment to an entire house
meant that he could spend his weekends poking around yard
sales and looking for treasures, and he collected all kinds
of things. There were, of course, books, of which he

(22:19):
had approximately twenty five thousand by the end of his life,
but also cheese graters, salt and pepper shakers, knickknacks, interesting rocks, toys, games, art,
including some terrifically bad art, on and on. He was
often inspired by the Japanese concept of wabi sabi, which

(22:40):
ties to beauty found in the simple, the impermanent, and
the mundane. His time on Cape cod really contributed to
the perception that Edward Gorey was a recluse in New
York City. He had gone out almost every night, especially
when the ballet was performing, always wearing this very recognizable
fur coat and jewelry. But after he moved into the

(23:01):
Elephant House, he stayed Whome a lot more. In addition
to working, he read a vast number of books, and
he also watched a whole lot of TV. He spoke
often for his love of things like Dr Who, Buffy
the Vampire Slayer, and daytime soap operas. Grey's work is
also on TV. In Night he worked with Derek Lamb

(23:22):
to animate the Introduction to Mystery from Boston Public Television,
which for some people was their first introduction to Edward
Gory's work. Often, while he was watching all this television,
he'd make little bean bag creatures filled with rice, recognizable
animals like bats, frogs, and elephants, as well as characters
like fig Bash, a long armed creature from the Raging Tide,

(23:46):
or the Black Dolls Embroglio, who would later also have
his own alphabet book. Some of this perception that Edward
Gorey was reclusive came from interviews as well. He could
be quite charming and gregarious and interviews, but really only
if the interviewer was asking him interesting questions. If you
sat down with Edward Gorey with a list of boring, predictable,

(24:08):
obvious questions, you might get a bunch of one word
or evasive answers in response, especially if other interviewers before
you had already asked those same boring, predictable, obvious things.
So if you walked into an interview with Edward Gorey
and you asked him why do you like to draw
such maccab pictures? When he had been asked that question

(24:29):
and also hated being called maccab in the first place,
you might get the impression he didn't like talking to people.
To add to all this solitude and Curmudgeonlinus Gory always
lived alone and he never had a serious romantic relationship.
Combined with an often campy way of speaking and presenting himself,

(24:50):
this led people naturally to wonder about his sexual orientation.
In interview with Boston magazine, Lisa's Salad asked him what
his sex all preferences were, and he answered, quote, well,
I'm neither one thing nor the other. Particularly later in
that same interview, she asked, is the sexlessness of your
books a product of your a sexuality? And he answered

(25:13):
I would say so, although every now and then someone
will say my books are seething with repressed sexuality. These
ideas came up in other interviews as well. For example,
in four he told Richard Dyer of Boston Globe Magazine quote,
sometimes I asked myself why I never ended up with
somebody for the rest of my life, and then I
realized that obviously I didn't want to, or I would have.

(25:37):
So it's definitely true that Gorey led a solitary life,
particularly once he moved to Cape cod and he tended
not to answer the door, the phone, or the mail,
although that led to him feeling guilty about unopened piles
of fan mail, which he once called thank you for
Being you Crap. He didn't like to be flattered or
fussed over or bothered. He didn't want to talk about

(25:58):
interpretations of his work because he liked the idea of
people's imaginations having their own possibilities. I'm just putting it
out there. I will read thank you for being you
Crap any day of the week. At the same time,
though it is really not accurate to think of Edward
Gorey as a hermit or a recluse. He gave most

(26:19):
of those little being bag creatures that he made a
way to his friends, even as he developed a cult
fan following. He was listed in the phone Book, and
he was generous with his time when fans ran into
him out in public. If he literally knocked on the door,
he might not answer it, but if he did answer it,
expecting it to be someone he knew, he would talk
to you. He ate out almost every day, with Jack's

(26:42):
Outback Restaurant being a particular favorite. He did a lot
of work that required him to be social, particularly working
with community theaters all up and down Cape Cod, staging plays,
and working on sets and costumes. Edward Gorey wrote and
published books continually from nineteen fifty three all the way
to the end of his life. He created more than

(27:04):
one hundred books of his own, and also designed the
covers for hundreds of others, as well as handling the
design and typography for at least a hundred more. His
illustrations accompanied the writings of T. S. Elliott, John Updyke,
Lewis Carroll, Virginia Woolf, H. G. Wells, bram Stoker, and
Gilbert and Sullivan, among others. My introduction to T. S.

(27:26):
Eliot was actually an addition of Old Possum's Book of
Practical Cats illustrated by Edward Gorey, which Edward Gorey's Cats
are a lot friendlier and goofier than maybe anything else
that he drew, like, they often have these big doofy
smiles on their faces, and they look really loungely and cuddly,
And so I got this impression that T. S. Eliot

(27:47):
was like a little snug bug. Yeah. And then I
got The College and I had to read The Waste Land,
and I was like, what is the where are the kiddie?
I still have that book. So, because Gory's original books

(28:08):
are illustrated and they often feature children as characters, and
because about twenty of these original books are alphabet books,
sometimes people think of him as a children's author, and
because terrible things often are happening to these children's these
children in the books. He's also often imagined to have
hated children. But really, in his adult life he didn't

(28:31):
know any children. He didn't have any anti antipathy for
them at all. At every time this came up in
an interview, he consistently would be like, no, I don't
actually know any kids. While many of his books were
suitable for most ages, others had a decidedly adult twist.
For example, he illustrated the recently deflowered Girl the Right

(28:52):
thing to Say on every dubious occasion. Published under the
pseudonym of Miss Hyacinth Phipps. It's a Faux Advice May
anual written by mel Juffey for what ladies should say
after being deflowered in a variety of odd and sometimes
awful situations. Gorey also wrote an illustrated the Curious Sofa
of pornographic work by Adrid Weary, which contains no nudity

(29:16):
or explicit language, but also points the imagination in a
very particular direction. Today, many but not all, of Gorey's
books are available in collections with names like Ampaguory and
Ampagory two. The first of these came out in nineteen
seventy two. Although Gory himself preferred his books as they
were originally printed and bound, today a lot of them

(29:38):
are out of print. Outside of these collections, you can
definitely find a lot of standalone books too, but there
are things that are in those collections that it's it's
hard to find in any other way. Gorey died on
April fifteenth, two thousand, at the age of seventy five,
following a heart attack that he had had a few
days before. He was cremated, with part of his ashes

(29:58):
sent to be buried with his family. Part floated out
to sea on a raft made of branches from the
magnolia tree that grows outside of Elephant House, in a
small part saved to be scattered in the yard where
the cats were to be buried after the last of
their deaths. He left most of his estate to the
Edward Gory Charitable Trust, which funds animal welfare organizations. Edward

(30:20):
Gorey was actually really interested in animal welfare, particularly cats
and bats, and in general uh the welfare of animals.
He actually gave up wearing all those famous fur coats
as he became more interested in animal where welfare. Later
on in his life, when a family of raccoons invaded
the Elephant House, he let them keep living there, almost

(30:43):
as penance for having worn a raccoon coat for so long.
By the time he died, he had amassed a collection
of twenty one fur coats, which the found the Foundation
started off selling at a rate of one per year,
and then sold the rest at auction in as a fundraiser.
In two thousand two, the Highland Street Foundation purchased the

(31:03):
Edward Gory Home and today it is the Edward Gory
House Museum, which is open seasonally. Edward Gorey's influence continued
to grow in the last decades of his life and
after his death. In an article in The New York Times,
Daniel Handler, the author of a series of Unfortunate Events,
which is published under the name Lemony Snicket, said, quote,

(31:25):
when I was first writing a series of Unfortunate Event Events,
I was wandering around everywhere saying I am a complete
rip off of Edward Gory and everyone said, here's that.
Now everyone says, that's right, you are a complete rip
off of Edward Gorey. Uh. That delights me. Daniel Handler

(31:46):
dragging himself cracks me up a little bit. The first
volume of that series of books came out the year
before Edward Gorey's death. Neil Gaiman had actually said that
he wanted Edward Gorey to illustrate his book Coraline, but
Gory died the that game and finished writing it. I
don't actually know if Tim Burton has ever specifically cited

(32:06):
Edward Gory as an influence, but a lot of people
writing about Tim Burton make that connection. Well. The style
is very similar of his drawings for sure. Um, so,
whether he said it or not, I think you can't
discount it like there's a very valid connection there. Uh.
And Tracy included this quote in her outline to end
with quote for some reason, my mission in life is

(32:30):
to make everybody as uneasy as possible. I think we
should all be as uneasy as possible, because that's what
the world is like. And that was Edward Gory is
quoted by Richard Dyer in Boston Globe Magazine in We'll
also put a link in our show notes just for
fun from the great sadly no longer actively in production.

(32:52):
Uh website the toast called how to Tell if You're
in an Edward Gory book, which is delightful. That is
Edward Gory. Do you have a little bit of listener
mail to go with this episode? I sure do have
some listener mail. This email is from Brandon. It is
about I Mean Pasha, and Brandon says, hello, Steph, you

(33:13):
miss in history class, then says some nice things about
the show before going on to say I know it
has been nearly a month since he first published the
podcast on I Mean Pasha, but I still wanted to
write to you about it. I currently am working for
an NGO in Gulu, Uganda. Gulu is in northern Uganda.
It is only about a hundred kilometers from the border

(33:34):
with South Sudan. He sent a photo. Near Gulu, there
is an old fort that was used by Samuel Baker
when he was warring against Arab slave slave traders. Samuel
Baker was an English explorer who worked in the area
in the eighteen sixties and early seventies. He was also,
interestingly enough, the person who founded Equatoria in modern day

(33:55):
South Studan. I thoroughly enjoyed investigating the names of the
places that A Mean Pasha visited when he was in
East Africa. Now I have new places I want to
visit while living here. From being honest, I've been trying
to find a connection to one of the podcasts so
that I could write you to your show. I love
listening to it while I'm driving back in the States.
We're lying under a fan on a hot day in Gulu.

(34:16):
Thank you so much for everything you do. Thank you
so much Brandon for writing this note. I love to
hear from listeners who are living in some of the
places that, from our point of view, are more remote
to us. Um that's always awesome, so thank you again
for writing that note. If you would like to write
to us about this or any other podcast or a

(34:37):
history podcast, at how stuff works dot com. We're also
on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash missed in History,
our Twitter and our Tumbler and our Pinterest and our
Instagram and all those things. Everything is under missed in history.
You can come to our website, which is missed in
history dot com, where we have show notes for all
the episodes that Holly and I have ever done together.
You'll actually see a picture of Edward Gorey on a

(35:00):
set for Dracula, which to get a sense of what
that looks like. So you can do all that and
a whole lot more at our website, which is missed
in History dot com for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com.