About the Author

Rex Warner (1905-1986) was a novelist, translator of Latin and Greek, and scholar of classical literature. A member of the Auden generation, Warner wrote several darkly allegorical novels, most notably The Aerodome, before turning to historical fiction and in 1960 winning the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his Imperial Caesar. Warner was a translator of Xenophon, Thucydides, Plutarch, Caesar, and St. Augustine as well as the poet and Nobel laureate George Seferis, whom he befriended while acting as Director of the British Institute in Athens in the years immediately following World War II. After teaching literature at Bowdoin and the University of Connecticut, Warner returned to England in the 1970s. 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 has 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.

Reviews

“In first place, the stories are beautiful and satisfying in themselves. In the second place, they have deeply affected our own literature.” –Rex Warner

“Shakespeare, Shelley, Tennyson and many others got their knowledge of Greek mythology from the often ironical–and always sophisticated–narratives of Ovid…Detail after detail fixes these myths in the memory…The Golden Age of Greece is dim today, but in Gods and Men the golden apples still shine upon the bough.” –The New York Times

“Rex Warner retells thirty-eight famous myths of ancient Greece that ought to be the intellectual heritage of all the young.” –The New York Times

“The British critic V. S. Pritchett once described Mr. Warner as ‘the only outstanding novelist of ideas whom the decade of ideas produced.’” –The New York Times