Nonsense!

The Curious Story of Edward Gorey

Versify 

(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

(pub. 3.24.2020) 

 40 pages

A True Tale with

A Cherry On Top   

A uthor: Lori Mortensen
       and illustrator: Chloe Bristol

C haracter:  Edward Gorey

O verview:

 

"Known for, among other things, wearing a large fur coat wherever he went, storyteller Edward Gorey was respected for both his brilliance and his eccentricity. As a child, he taught himself to read and skipped several grades before landing at Harvard (after a brief stint in the army). Then he built a name for himself as a popular book illustrator. After that, he went on to publish well over one hundred of his own books, stories that mingled sweetness and innocence, danger and darkness, all mixed with his own brand of silliness"

T antalizing taste:

"When publishers turned him down, Edward launched his own company, Fantod Press.

No one had ever seen books like Edward's before.

He wrote strange stories with curious titles like 

    The Unstrung  Harp,

    The Abandoned Sock,

    The Wuggly Ump,

    The Galoshes of Remorse,

    and The Gashlycrumb Tinies ...

Instead of drawing colorful, happy-go-lucky pictures, Edward used pen and ink to draw seas of sketchy black lines, as if the stories were set in a time and place long ago."

And something more:  The Author's Note explains that as a  child prodigy, Edward "began drawing by the age of one and a half and taught himself to read by the age of three. Since his books have a dark side, people think he must have had a tragic childhood too. But Gorey admitted his was as happy as anyone's and included playing neighborhood games of kick the can and Monopoly, going to the movies, and reading all kinds of books from comics to horror. His favorites included The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, books by A.A. Milne, and Agatha Christie mysteries."