Volume 49, Number 5 · March 28, 2002
In Goreyland
By John Russell
Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey
interviews selected and edited by Karen Wilkin
Harcourt, 292 pp., $35.00
The Object-Lesson
by Edward Gorey
Harcourt, 32 pp., $12.00
When he died in 2000 at the age of seventy-five Edward Gorey was well known and widely treasured as a draftsman, a storyteller, an illustrator, a balletomane of long standing, a master of the educated book-jacket, and an inventor of images that were peculiar to himself. Among image-makers, who but he would have made us look with lasting enjoyment at a skeleton that lies reading in a hammock, center front, while a few feet behind him a garden party goes on as if nothing unusual was happening? That particular image was the star in his recent show at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York. Among the other implausible fancies that he at one time or another brought into the circus of the everyday was that of a prodigiously long-haired dog on whose back the words 'What Might Have Been' stood out in big letters. This caused many a sensitive observer to pause and reflect, half in grief and half in terror.
Review, 1862 words
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