His stepmother was Corinna Mura (1910–1965), a cabaret singer who had a small role in Casablanca as the woman playing the guitar while singing "La Marseillaise" at Rick's Café Américain.

Gorey's maternal great-grandmother, Helen St. John Garvey, was a nineteenth-century greeting card illustrator,[5] from whom he claimed to have inherited his talents.

From 1934 to 1937, Gorey attended public school in the Chicago suburb of Wilmette, Illinois, where his classmates included Charlton Heston, Warren MacKenzie, and Joan Mitchell.

He illustrated works as diverse as Bram Stoker's Dracula, H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds,[14] and T. S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.

[15] Throughout his career, he illustrated over 200 book covers for Doubleday Anchor, Random House's Looking Glass Library, Bobbs-Merrill, and as a freelance artist.

At the prompting of Harry Stanton, an editor and vice president at Addison-Wesley, Gorey collaborated on a number of works (and continued a lifelong correspondence) with Peter F.

"[19] Gorey's illustrated (and sometimes wordless) books, with their vaguely ominous air and ostensibly Victorian and Edwardian settings, have long had a cult following.

In later years, he lived year-round in Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, where he wrote and directed numerous evening-length entertainments, often featuring his own papier-mâché puppets, an ensemble known as Le Theatricule Stoique.

[22] The last was The White Canoe: an Opera Seria for Hand Puppets, for which Gorey wrote the libretto, with a score by the composer Daniel James Wolf.

The opera, which was based on Thomas Moore's poem The Lake of the Dismal Swamp, was performed under the direction of Carol Verburg, a close friend and neighbor of the artist, after Gorey passed away.

After Gorey's death, one of his executors, Andreas Brown, turned up a large cache of unpublished work, both complete and incomplete.

[24] Critic David Ehrenstein, writing in Gay City News, asserts that Gorey was discreet about his sexuality in the "Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell era" of the 1950s.

Alexander Theroux states that when Gorey was pressed on the matter of his sexual orientation by "a rude Boston Globe reporter," he replied, "I don't even know."

He was once interviewed on Tribute to Edward Gorey, a community, public-access television cable show produced by artist and friend Joyce Kenney.

Gorey served as a volunteer camera-person and master control operator at that same public access station, where he designed community bulletin graphics.

[29] Gorey left the bulk of his estate to a charitable trust benefiting cats and dogs, as well as other species, including bats and insects.

"[30] Gorey classified his own work as literary nonsense, the genre made most famous by Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear.

Shortly before Gorey's death, Handler sent a copy of the series's first two novels to him, with a letter "saying how much I admired his work, and how much I hoped that he would forgive what I'd stolen from him."

In 1976, jazz composer Michael Mantler recorded an album called The Hapless Child (Watt/ECM) with Robert Wyatt, Terje Rypdal, Carla Bley, and Jack DeJohnette.

It contains musical adaptations of The Sinking Spell, The Object Lesson, The Insect God, The Doubtful Guest, The Remembered Visit, and The Hapless Child.

In the last few decades of his life, Gorey merchandise became quite popular, with stuffed dolls, cups, stickers, posters, and other items available at malls around the United States.

[11] In 2007, The Jim Henson Company announced plans to produce a feature film based on The Doubtful Guest to be directed by Brad Peyton.