I interviewed Peter for my biography of Edward Gorey, with whom he collaborated on three wonderfully droll children's books. Getting to know him to the point where I felt entitled to call him friend was, to this Gorey biographer, a thrill that never grew old. Even as a nonagenarian, Peter was lightning-quick off the mark. Insatiably curious about whatever books or movies or artists I name-dropped, he returned the favor with a flurry of suggestions for books I must read, authors who might be congenial to my style of mind, poets whose work was a source of inspiration and philosophical consolation to him. During our occasional Zooms, phone calls, and desultory e-mails, we discussed children’s literature, our shared passion for Kafka, the vexations of academia, our aesthetics as poets, the strange “placelessness” of San Diego, our battles with existential melancholy (and the useful cures prescribed by Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy) and countless other subjects, not least Gorey. As writers, we live our lives on the page--and live on, between two covers, in a counterfeit immortality. I’ve kept all our mails and will return to them, and Peter’s books, whenever I want to commune with his gentle wit and firefly intellect, flitting from reference to allusion to free-associated insight. He was luminous.

Neptune SNC-Santa Rosa

Peter Neumeyer

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OBITUARY

Peter Florian Neumeyer

August 4, 1929 – April 2, 2026

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