Editing Edward Gorey (section)

== Style ==
[[File:Willowdale Handcar.jpg|thumb|200px|right|Cover of ''The Willowdale Handcar'' (1962)]]

Gorey is typically described as an illustrator. His books may be found in the humor and cartoon sections of major bookstores, but books such as ''The Object Lesson'' have earned serious critical respect as works of [[surrealism|surrealist]] art. His experimentation—creating books that were wordless, books that were literally matchbox-sized, pop-up books, books entirely populated by inanimate objects—complicates matters still further. As Gorey told Lisa Solod of ''[[The Boston Globe]]'', "Ideally, if anything were any good, it would be indescribable."<ref>{{cite book |last = Dery |first = Mark |title = Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=WzlTDwAAQBAJ&q=%22Ideally,+if+anything+were+any+good,+it+would+be+indescribable.%22&pg=PT20 |publisher = Little, Brown and Company |date = November 6, 2018 |isbn = 978-0-316-18854-8 |page = 14}}</ref> Gorey classified his own work as [[literary nonsense]], the genre made most famous by [[Lewis Carroll]] and [[Edward Lear]].

In response to being called [[Gothic fiction|gothic]], he stated, "If you're doing nonsense it has to be rather awful, because there'd be no point. I'm trying to think if there's sunny nonsense. Sunny, funny nonsense for children—oh, how boring, boring, boring. As [[Franz Schubert|Schubert]] said, there is no happy music. And that's true, there really isn't. And there's probably no happy nonsense, either."<ref>[[Stephen Schiff|Schiff, Stephen]]. "Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense." ''The New Yorker'', November 9, 1992: 84–94, p. 89.</ref>