Edward Gorey at Harvard University

After being honorably discharged from the army in 1946, Gorey returned to Chicago. A postcard arrived shortly thereafter from Harvard University. Written on the back was an exhortation, “When are you coming?” He later said that before reading this question, he had not considered Harvard: “I wasn’t even thinking about it at the time.” He knew that the G.I. Bill would pay his tuition so he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. He majored in French literature and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1950.

 Gorey began pursuing artistic interests, publishing stories and poems in Signature whose by line was “The Only Undergraduate Magazine of Radcliffe College and Harvard University.”  Gorey published three poems and three stories in Signature between 1948 and 1950.  In the Winter 1949 issue he published “Saint Melissa-The Mottled” without illustrations.  The text was published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Press with a series of Gorey drawings culled from the corpus of his art work.