Born to be posthumous : the eccentric life and mysterious genius of Edward Gorey / Mark Dery.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 423-426) and index.

A good mystery -- A suspiciously normal childhood: Chicago, 1925-44 -- Mauve sunsets: Dugway, 1944-46 -- "Terribly intellectual and avant-garde and all that jazz": Harvard, 1946-50 -- Sacred monsters: Cambridge, 1950-53 -- "Like a captive balloon, motionless between sky and earth": New York, 1953 -- Hobbies odd--ballet, the Gotham Book Mart, silent film, feuillade: 1953 -- Épater le bourgeois: 1954-58 -- "Working perversely to please himself": 1959-63 -- Nursery crimes--the Gashlycrumb Tinies and other outrages: 1963 -- Worshipping in Balanchine's temple: 1964-67 -- Mail bonding--collaborations: 1967-72 -- Dracula: 1973-78 -- Mystery!: 1979-85 -- Strawberry Lane forever: Cape Cod, 1985-2000 -- Flapping ankles, crazed teacups, and other entertainments -- "Awake in the dark of night thinking Gorey thoughts" -- The curtain falls.

"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, deliciously sinister little books have influenced our culture in countless ways, from Tim Burton's movies to Anna Sui's fashion to Neil Gaiman's Coraline to Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. Some call him the Grandfather of Goth (which would've given him the fantods). Just who was this man, who lived with six cats, owned more than 20,000 books, roomed with the poet Frank O'Hara at Harvard, and liked to traipse around in floor-length fur coats, clanking bracelets, and an Edwardian beard? An eccentric, a solitary, 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, Muriel Spark, Bram Stoker, and John Bellairs (most notably The House with a Clock in Its Walls), among others. At the same time, he was a deeply complicated and secretive man, a reclusive master whose art reflected his obsessions with the disquieting, the darkly amusing, and... other things. Based on newly uncovered correspondence and interviews with Goreyphiles as diverse as John Ashbery, Donald Hall, Lemony Snicket, Neil Gaiman, Edmund White, and Anna Sui, Born to Be Posthumous draws back the curtain on this mysterious genius and his eccentric life."