The following is an excerpt from a biography by Linda Davis, called Charles Addams: A Cartoonist’s Life, that originally appeared on NPR.org.
They said that Charles Addams slept in a coffin and drank martinis with eyeballs in them. They said he kept a guillotine at his house and received chopped-off fingers in the mail from fans […] What, people wanted to know, was Charles Addams really like? Even in places where people had never heard of The New Yorker, said Calvin Trillin, “eventually they’d get around to asking about [resident cartoonist] Addams.”
[…] Though much of Addams’s work was funny without being dark, and marked by great sweetness, it was the sinister stuff that had made him famous and earned him such sobriquets as “the Van Gogh of the Ghouls,” “the Bela Lugosi of the cartoonists,” “the graveyard guru,” and a purveyor of “American Gothic.” His work was compared to that of Shakespeare and Poe.
The Addams name was intertwined with a certain kind of offbeat character and place. One saw a particular type of woman — model-thin, with pale skin and long black hair, wearing a black dress — and thought: “Morticia.” Round, bald men brought Uncle Fester to mind. The Addams name also conjured an atmosphere, and a house — a peeling Victorian confection that had come to represent something menacing […] It was no coincidence that the notorious Hitchcock movie Psycho, released in 1960, had featured an Addamsesque Victorian as the home of the psychopath Norman Bates: Hitchcock had become an Addams friend and owned two of his original cartoons…
