From The Gashlycrumb Tinies to The Doubtful Guest, Edward Gorey's books have influenced our culture in countless ways, from Tim Burton's movies to Anna Sui's fashion to Neil Gaiman's Coraline to Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. An eccentric, a solitary, an enigmatic auteur of whimsically morbid masterpieces, yes -- but who was the real Edward Gorey behind the Oscar Wildean pose? He published over a hundred books and illustrated works by Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, Edward Lear, John Updike, Charles Dickens, Muriel Spark, Bram Stoker, and John Bellairs (most notably The House with a Clock in Its Walls), among others. At the same time, he was a deeply complicated and secretive man, a reclusive master whose art reflected his obsessions with the disquieting, the darkly amusing, and ... other things. Based on newly uncovered correspondence and interviews with Goreyphiles as diverse as John Ashbery, Donald Hall, Lemony Snicket, Neil Gaiman, Edmund White, and Anna Sui, Dery draws back the curtain on this mysterious genius and his eccentric life.