Later the Doubtful Guest was developed into a more disturbing, eyeless being with long rubbery arms, known as Figbash and partly echoing Max Ernst's protean figure Loplop. This led to Edmund Wilson's 1959 New Yorker appreciation of the early books - Gorey's first major critical notice. The finely detailed ink drawings have rhyming captions, concluding:įascination with surrealism came to the fore in The Object-Lesson (1958), whose story tumbles through artful non-sequiturs while the artwork shows increased mastery of balance and design. In the very popular The Doubtful Guest (1957), a country-house family resembling one of Compton-Burnett's is dismayed by the uninvited Guest, a mournful, furry, inexplicable creature in white tennis shoes. His first picture-book was The Unstrung Harp or, Mr Earbrass Writes a Novel (1953), a lovingly tongue-in-cheek study of a lugubrious Edwardian novelist grappling with inspiration, distraction, publishing's eternal truths, and "the unspeakable horror of the literary life." He then worked for the art department of Doubleday Anchor Books. After three years as a wartime clerk in the US army - largely in the Utah desert - he went to Harvard, where he majored in French. After high school he attended the Chicago School of Art for a term. Many American readers suspected Gorey of being English, but he was born in Chicago of a Roman Catholic newspaperman father and an Episcopalian mother.
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