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The mission of the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust is to honor the creative and philanthropic legacy of Edward Gorey through preservation and promotion of his literary and artistic works and support of the animal welfare causes to which he was devoted.

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Edward Gorey created the Trust in his will, designating it as the sole owner of his intellectual property and charging it to benefit organizations โ€œwhose primary purpose is the welfare of animals.โ€ The Trust pursues its mission by licensing Mr. Goreyโ€™s intellectual property, lending his work to museums and other exhibitors, and issuing grants for animal rescue, care, and conservation. In 2019, the Trust began new efforts to organize Mr. Goreyโ€™s archive for the use of researchers and educators and to expand the reach of his work through collaborations with artists, designers, non-profit organizations, and others.

Edward Gorey

โ€œThe facts of my life are so few, tedious, and irrelevant to anything else, there is no point in going into them,โ€ Edward St. John Gorey told an interviewer, which should reduce his biography to โ€œborn February 22, 1925, Chicago; died April 15, 2000, Barnstable, MA,โ€ with a mention of his idiosyncratic writings and drawings. Itโ€™s true that there is no overt drama in Goreyโ€™s history and no fraught relationships. Instead, there is an astonishing dedication to work, as well as to arcane films, ballet, TV sitcoms, cats, and collecting books, used toys, and miscellany, plus enormous erudition, and connections with some of the most significant literary figures of his generation.

Gorey was raised mainly in and near Chicago, where he attended the Francis W. Parker School, with his close friend the future Abstract Expressionist painter Joan Mitchell. His earliest works, apart from drawings of โ€œsausage-like trains,โ€ made at one and a half, were illustrations for his elementary school yearbook. (Goreyโ€™s precocity included teaching himself to read at three.) Graduating from high school at seventeen, in 1942, and eligible for the draft, he enrolled for one semester at the Art Institute of Chicago, his only art training. He spent 1943 to 1946 serving in World War II, mostly at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. โ€œEvery time I pick up a paper and see that 12,000 more sheep died mysteriously in Utah,โ€ Gorey told Dick Cavett in 1977, โ€œI think โ€˜Oh, theyโ€™re at it again.โ€™โ€

Read more about Edward Gorey โ†’

With bat. From a photograph by Ira Wyman, 1977.

The Team