Editing Edward Gorey (section)

== Early life ==
Gorey was born in [[Chicago]]. His parents, Helen Dunham (née Garvey) and Edward Leo Gorey,<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.wargs.com/other/gorey.html|title=Ancestry of Edward Gorey|last=Reitwiesner|first=William Addams|website=www.wargs.com}}</ref> divorced in 1936 when he was 11. His father remarried in 1952 when he was 27. His stepmother was [[Corinna Mura]] (1910–1965), a cabaret singer who had a small role in ''[[Casablanca (film)|Casablanca]]'' as the woman playing the guitar while singing "[[La Marseillaise]]" at Rick's Café Américain. His father was briefly a journalist. Gorey's maternal great-grandmother, Helen St. John Garvey, was a nineteenth-century [[greeting card]] illustrator,<ref>{{cite web |title=Gorey's Early Life and Childhood |url=http://www.lib.luc.edu/specialcollections/exhibits/show/gorey/childhood-and-early-life |website=Loyola University Chicago Digital Special Collections |publisher=Loyola University Chicago |access-date=7 February 2023}}</ref> 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]].<ref>{{Cite book|last=Dery|first=Mark|url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1028203847|title=Born to Be Posthumous : The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey|date=2018|publisher=Little, Brown and Company|isbn=978-0-316-18854-8|edition=|location=New York|pages=44|oclc=1028203847}}</ref> Some of his earliest preserved work appears in the Stolp School yearbook for 1937.<ref name="Smithsonian">[[Smithsonian Institution]] [https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/surveys/chicago/wilmette-historical-museum/1937-stolp-school-yearbook-edward-gorey 1937 Stolp School yearbook with Edward Gorey juvenilia]</ref> Afterward, he attended the [[Francis W. Parker School (Chicago)|Francis W. Parker School]] in Chicago. He spent 1944 to 1946 in the [[United States Army|Army]] at [[Dugway Proving Ground]] in [[Utah]]. He then attended [[Harvard University]], beginning in 1946 and graduating in the class of 1950; he studied French and roomed with poet [[Frank O'Hara]].<ref name="HARVARDMAGAZINE2007">Lumenello, Susan, [http://harvardmagazine.com/2007/03/edward-gorey.html "Edward Gorey: Brief life of an artful author: 1925–2000"], ''[[Harvard Magazine]]'', March–April 2007</ref>  Starting in 1951, Gorey illustrated poetry books by [[Merrill Moore]] for [[Twayne Publishers]] including ''[https://archive.org/details/caserecordfromso00moor/mode/2up Case Record from a Sonnetorium]'' (many illustrations by Gorey, 1951), and ''More Clinical Sonnets'' (1953).<ref>{{cite book |title=I Never Had a Best-seller: The Story of a Small Publisher |first=Jacob |last=Steinberg |year=1992 |publisher=Hippocrene Books |isbn=9780781800495 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Uo8VAQAAIAAJ&q=Edward%20Gorey |access-date=January 4, 2023}}</ref>

In the early 1950s, Gorey, with a group of recent Harvard and Radcliffe alumni including [[Alison Lurie]] (1947), [[John Ashbery]] (1949), [[Donald Hall]] (1951), and O'Hara (1950), amongst others, founded the Poets' Theatre in Cambridge, which was supported by Harvard faculty members [[John Ciardi]] and [[Thornton Wilder]].<ref name="HARVARDMAGAZINE2007" /><ref name="GRANDSTREET1984">[[Nora Sayre|Sayre, Nora]], [https://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/25006626 "The Poets' Theatre: A Memoir of the Fifties"], ''[[Grand Street (magazine)|Grand Street]]'', Vol. 3, No. 3 (Spring, 1984), pp. 92–105. Published by: Ben Sonnenberg</ref><ref name="HARVARDMAGAZINE2002">[http://harvardmagazine.com/2002/01/obsessed-at-harvard.html "Open Book: Obsessed at Harvard"], ''Harvard Magazine'', January–February 2002</ref>

He frequently stated that his formal art training was "negligible"; Gorey studied art for one semester at the [[School of the Art Institute of Chicago]] in 1943.<ref>{{cite news |url=https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/Horizons/2013/0222/Edward-Gorey-writer-artist-and-a-most-puzzling-man |publisher=Christian Science Monitor |title=Edward Gorey: writer, artist, and a most puzzling man |date=February 22, 2013 |author=Aimee Ortiz}}</ref>