Gelett Burgess life and biography

Frank Gelett Burgess was an artist, art critic, poet, author and humorist. An important figure in the San Francisco Bay Area literary renaissance of the 1890s, particularly through his iconoclastic little magazine, The Lark, he is best known as a writer of nonsense verse. He was the author of the popular Goops books, and he invented the blurb.

Former draftsman, he became a magazine editor and then cartoonist/author when he began publishing in book form his works of humor in 1907. Burgess was fired from the faculty of UC Berkeley in 1894 after his involvement with the toppling of a horrifically ugly statue. He coined the term "blurb" in 1907, when he claimed "Miss Belinda Blurb" as the author of a blurb that he obviously wrote himself.

I never saw a purple cow,
I never hope to see one;
But I can tell you, anyhow, I'd rather see than be one.

Author of books:

Vivette (1897); novelette
The Lively City O'Ligg (1899); juvenile
Goops, and How to be Them (1900); juvenile
A Gage of Youth (1901); Poems, chiefly from The Lark
The Burgess Nonsense Book (1901); prose and verse
The Romance of the Commonplace (1901)
More Goops, and How Not to Be Them (1903); juvenile
The Reign of Queen Isyl (1903); short stories in collaboration with Will Irwin
The Picaroons (1904); short stories in collaboration with Will Irwin
The Rubaiyat of Omar Cayenne (1904); satire and parody
Goop Tales (1904); juvenile
A Little Sister of Destiny (1904); short stories
Are You a Bromide? (1906); short book
The White Cat (1907); novel
The Heart Line (1907); novel
The Maxims of Methuselah (1907); satire and parody
Blue Goops and Red (1909); juvenile
Lady Mechante (1909); novel
The Master of Mysteries (1912)
The Maxims of Noah (1913)
The Goop Encyclopedia: Containing Every Child's Every Fault (1916); juvenile
Have You an Educated Heart? (1923)
Why Men Hate Women (1927)
The Purple Cow
Ain't Angie Awful (1923)
Look Eleven Years Younger (1937)

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