Alexander Theroux, author of The Strange Case of Edward Gorey (recently revised and republished by Fantagraphics), talks to NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday about the writer and illustrator Edward Gorey, who would have been 86 years old today:
Violence is the essential Gorey ingredient. It is used in his books with such off-hand wit and inevitability that, having become his signature, if it were suddenly missing, you would begin to worry or at least feel you are being fobbed off by work not of the master’s hand.
NPR THE WEEKEND EDITION: THE LIFE OF EDWARD GOREY
Theroux also talks about his peculiar friend with Tom Spurgeon at The Comics Reporter:
I was telling someone the other day, there a division in the 20s and post WWI era, especially growing up in England. I think Gorey inherited this. There were the athletes, the muscular types — on one side of the tennis court, as it were. Then there were these kind of fey, bright young things on the other side of the tennis court. There has always been a kind of mocking, derisive look that they took regarding each other. I think Gorey grew out of that kind of gay interest, that fascination with ’20s movies, ’20s styles; there’s a tradition, I think. He was unhappy in the military and when he was at Harvard he was always in an artsy world. He went to the ballet every night in New York. He was almost a caricature of that Ronald Firbank type of character. He was very fey. He didn’t hide any of that.