Gorey's only formal art training came during the single year that he attended the Art Institute of Chicago, after graduating high school. But he was drafted into the army in 1944, serving as a clerk for two years at a chemical weapons testing site. When released, Gorey, then 21 years old, came to Harvard in the fall of 1946.

Odd Man in Eliot House

Gorey's life at Harvard revolved around the arts; he concentrated in French literature and was involved in several drama productions as an undergraduate. He roomed, for several years, with future poet Frank O'Hara '50 in Eliot House.

Brad Gooch writes of the duo's college days in City Poet, his 1995 biography of O'Hara. Gooch quotes photographer George Marshall '51-53 who classified Gorey, known to wear capes and numerous rings, as the "oddest person I've ever seen. He was very tall, with his hair plastered down across the front like bangs, like a Roman emperor."

Gooch reports Gorey and O'Hara established for themselves distinct reputations on campus. Gorey romped around in long fur coats and basketball sneakers; when he wore sandals, his toenails were sometimes painted green.

He and O'Hara adorned their Eliot House suite with white modern garden furniture, including a chaise lounge. They used as a coffee table a tombstone taken from Mt. Auburn Cemetery. Gorey often sat atop this table while designing his illustrations.

Poet's Theatre

Undecided in what career to pursue, Gorey remained in Cambridge for a few years after graduation. Both he and O'Hara became active in the Harvard Poet's Theatre, a group of Harvard and Radcliffe students who performed low-budget, self-written plays to small audiences.

They often found space to perform at the Fogg Art Museum, as well as a little house located on Palmer Street. The Palmer Street Theater, which could only house 47 guests, was, in time, taken over by the Coop.

Alison Lurie remembers fondly one of the plays that Gorey wrote and directed through the Poet's Theater. It was called Amabel, and "was very amusing."

"It was very much like the work he became famous for; kind of Victorian, kind of Edwardian," she recalls. "It had the kind of way-out characters and costumes that he had fun creating."

The friends who formed the Harvard Poets Theatre included O'Hara, Kenneth Koch '48 and John Ashbery '49, in addition to Gorey and Lurie. They formed a tight group, according to Lurie.

"The people most involved in the theater saw each other all the time," she remembers. "And we all had a wonderful time."

And they fooled around like typical Harvard students.

"We did odd things," says Lurie. "We would go to the Morgan Memorial, which was a big old second-hand place where we could get costumes; or we would go out to the cemetery and make rubbings with crayons and ink," she continued.

"We had no idea that some of the people involved were going to grow up to be famous poets, so we didn't take ourselves that seriously. The people that took themselves seriously, not all that much became of them."

Gorey was involved with several other plays with the Poet's Theater, but he eventually decided it was time to move on.