Rex Warner (1905—1986) was an author, translator, and professor of English. Born in Birmingham, England, he was educated at Oxford. Warner was a member of the British Home Guard from 1942 until 1945. He was the Tallman Professor of Classics at Bowdoin College before joining the English faculty at the University of Connecticut in 1962.
Edward Gorey (1925—2000) was born in Chicago. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, spent three years in the army testing poison gas, and attended Harvard College, where he majored in French literature and roomed with the poet Frank O’Hara. In 1953 Gorey published The Unstrung Harp, the first of his many extraordinary illustrated books, which include The Curious Sofa, The Haunted Tea Cosy, and The Epileptic Bicycle. NYRB published Gorey’s illustrated edition of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds and The Haunted Looking Glass, a selection of his favorite tales of ghosts, ghouls, and grisly goings-on.
