One constant throughout Gorey’s peripatetic school years was his drawing. He was always making cartoons and designing things for yearbooks, and his great good luck was attending the Francis W. Parker School, an advanced, liberal place that encouraged individual thinking and creative work. It was there that he met his lifelong friend Connie (Consuelo) Joerns and palled around with Joan Mitchell, on her way to becoming a world-famous Abstract Expressionist artist — they liked each other while scorning each other’s art. (Gorey made it very clear that whatever he may have been, it was certainly not a painter.) In his application for a Harvard National Scholarship, after emphasizing his interest in looking at and making art, he lists his other preoccupations: music, ballet, theater and movies. And books. His application lists 69 books he had read in the current year, ranging from Homer and Plato to Joyce and P. G. Wodehouse — all these apart from the innumerable mysteries he read (and would read throughout his life), including “my favorite author in all the world,” Agatha Christie. (When she died, he reports thinking, “I can’t go on.”) This passion for detective novels may be the one cultural impulse he shared with his equally addicted parents.

Accepted by Harvard, he postponed matriculating until his situation with the draft was clarified. The United States was well into the war, and he was, indeed, drafted in May 1943. Four months of basic training at Camp Roberts in central California (“God’s garbage pit”); then assignment — given his record-breaking intelligence tests — to learn Japanese; then, when that program was shut down, assignment to Dugway Proving Ground, in the Great Salt Lake Desert, to become a company clerk: typing, sorting mail, keeping the company books and, he reported, staying “sloshed on tequila.” And writing plays, which Dery convincingly labels “self-indulgent juvenilia.” The dialogue is over the top of the top: “Have you ever danced naked before a lesbian sodden with absinthe?” But here also are his lifelong Anglophilia, “love of nonsensical titles, preposterous names (Centaurea Teep, Mrs. Firedamp), even more preposterous place names (Galloping Fronds, Crumbling Outset) and absurd deaths.” And here are more resonant themes that will recur through the next 50 years: “the melancholy of lost time … the stealthy tiptoe of our approaching mortality … and of course, angst, ennui, the banal horrors of everyday life, arbitrary and unpredictable turns of events, cruelty to children (a governess kills her charge’s pet canary), the cruelty of children (a little girl bashes her big sister’s head in with a silver salver) and murder most foul.”

Gorey had practically no formal art instruction — a few classes here and there — and Harvard was as much a social experience as an educational one: He majored in French, he says, to give himself an excuse to read all of French literature, having read everything he needed to in English. His favorite writers were and remained Austen, Trollope, E. F. Benson (the Lucia novels) and Arthur Waley’s adaptation of Lady Murasaki (“Genji” was a lifelong obsession). For a couple of years after graduating, he hung around Boston, mostly working in bookshops. Unlike so many literary young men and women of his moment, he didn’t rush to travel through postwar Europe. (Despite his lifelong passion for things English, he went abroad only once: to the Scottish islands for a couple of weeks, after falling in love with the Powell-Pressburger movie “I Know Where I’m Going.” There was a layover in Heathrow, the closest he ever got to seeing England itself.) He mounted a well-attended show of watercolors in Cambridge, and he helped to found and was deeply involved with the Poets’ Theatre there, which staged plays by O’Hara, Ashbery, Richard Eberhart, Archibald MacLeish, Yeats, Lorca and Beckett (the first American staging of “All That Fall”) and presented Dylan Thomas’s first American reading of “Under Milk Wood.” He contributed two plays of his own, as well as designing sets and everything else that needed designing. He was beginning to sell drawings to various publications, and in late 1952 sold his first cover art to a major magazine, Harper’s. But essentially he was treading water — and he was 27.