Arts & Culture

G is for Gorey who’s ghastly and great

Attendees exploring the exhibit. Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer

Sy Boles

Harvard Staff Writer

September 8, 2025

5 min read

Houghton exhibition celebrates legendary artist’s offbeat, macabre sensibility

A pair of disembodied hands thrusts a cake topped with candles through an open window. A nearby menu announces only one course: cold boiled owl. A figure glances worriedly at an accumulation of boxes of chocolate. The caption: “The Horror of Having a Birthday.”

The offbeat illustration is one of several unpublished works by the late artist Edward Gorey ’50, on display in a new exhibit at Houghton Library.

“Edward Gorey: The Gloomy Gallery” playfully engages with Gorey’s foreboding yet oddly cozy imagination, with its world-weary malaise, and its whimsical embrace of the nonsensical.

“Edward Gorey is an incredibly special figure, and we are very happy to celebrate him on the 100th year since his birth,” Molly Schwartzburg, Philip Hofer Curator of Printing and Graphic Arts at Houghton Library, said at an opening reception on Sept. 4.

The exhibition, which is free and open to the public, marks Gorey’s 100th birthday and the 75th anniversary of his graduation from Harvard College. The pieces are drawn from the Houghton Library’s extensive holdings on the artist and span his career.

Edward Gorey. “The Horror of Having a Birthday,” around 1948–1955. From the estate of Anthony N. and Ann Smith. Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Of note are recently acquired works, including the “Birthday” piece, which Gorey gave to Tony Smith, his Harvard classmate and Eliot House roommate. The illustrations were passed down to Smith’s daughter, Barbie Selby, who attended the opening reception.

“Molly and Maggie did a great job mixing my dad’s art with the art that’s been printed or published,” Selby said, referring to Schwartzburg and co-curator Maggie Erwin, curatorial assistant in the printing and graphic arts department. “It’s been magical.”

The newly acquired pieces offer glimpses into the artist’s life at Harvard.

“We see evidence in these new drawings of his French literature classes, of the experiences of World War II veterans at Harvard, of architecture around Harvard Square, and of a Gorey friendship outside the rarified arty circles that have been written about for so long,” Schwartzburg said. “We also can see just how early on he established his distinctive aesthetic and flair for linguistic play. Harvard seems to have been a profoundly fruitful environment for him as a young artist.”

“We also can see just how early on he established his distinctive aesthetic and flair for linguistic play. Harvard seems to have been a profoundly fruitful environment for him as a young artist.” Molly Schwartzburg

Gorey famously roomed with poet Frank O’Hara, but much less is known about his friendship with Smith, his senior year roommate.

The two were not a natural pairing. Smith was a Phillips Exeter Academy alumnus, the scion of a wealth Republican family from Fall River, Mass. Smith concentrated in economics and would later spend his career in the insurance industry. He lived in Raleigh, N.C., for 50 years, according to his obituary.

Edward Gorey. “Halfway House,” around 1948–1955. From the estate of Anthony N. and Ann Smith. Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Gorey, a Chicago native, was considered something of an artistic eccentric who was entrenched in Harvard’s queer literary scene. Gorey would later move to New York and settled on Cape Cod in the 1980s. He died there in 2000.

Both men served in the military during World War II.

The two had a mutual friend and started periodically hanging out together in junior year. Schwartzburg said there isn’t a tremendous amount known about their ties. They apparently shared an interest in beachcombing and thrifting — Gorey’s biographer Mark Dery noted the two made weekly pilgrimages to Filene’s Basement.

Smith showed up frequently in Gorey’s artwork as a befuddled-looking figure with an elongated face. According to Smith’s daughter Selby, friends at the time speculated that Gorey, who was famously cagey about his sexuality, might have been infatuated with his roommate.

“I don’t know if that’s true,” Selby said. “My dad would have been oblivious to it.”

Edward Gorey. “The picture wasn’t, after all, me,” around 1948–1955. From the estate of Anthony N. and Ann Smith. Houghton Library, Harvard University.

A prodigious writer and illustrator, Gorey authored 116 books and is estimated to have created cover art for more than 500 books by other authors.

Among his most famous works is “The Gashlycrumb Tinies: A Very Gorey Alphabet Book,” in which each letter corresponds to a child perishing in darkly comic and sometimes surreal ways.

Gorey influenced countless contemporary writers, artists, and film directors, Schwartzburg said.

“I think that one of the reasons his popularity is so enduring is that his work feels untethered from his specific time and place. By setting his work in a sort of tweaked version of the past, he has somehow prevented it from ever becoming outdated.”

The exhibit revels in Gorey’s odd obsessions: balancing bicycles, Victorian vestments, furtive figures, and, of course, artful alliterations.

It also displays original materials from Houghton’s holdings from the Poets’ Theatre, the Cambridge organization that Gorey, along with O’Hara and a group of fellow Harvard and Radcliffe alumni, founded shortly after his graduation.

“Edward Gorey: The Gloomy Gallery” is open in the Edison and Newman Room in Houghton Library through Jan. 12. As Schwartzburg put it, “If you feel like you want to get gloomy, or if you’re feeling gloomy and you need a little lift, this is the place.”