F. Randall Dortmund’s parents had worked in publishing–specifically, in remainders–so he grew up surrounded by books that no one wanted to read. In the 1920’s and 1930’s, that worked out to writers of high Victorian prose and Gothic melancholy romances. Surrounded by reams of the stuff, Dortmund imbibed it all deeply and came to feel that those old authors were being wrongly overlooked in a cynical and overly practical age.

So it’s scarcely surprising that, when he came of age, Dortmund would write the sort of book he wanted to read. Toiling away in business school with a vague notion of taking over the family business, he wrote novel after novel of his own curious blend of chaste Victoriana and towering Gothic melodrama. His family connections were enough to get the first few published, but in 1947 that wasn’t what most people wanted to read.

The later postwar era, though, saw an explosion of interest in Dortmund’s work, enough that he was able to support himself as a full-time writer. His books shed some of the most irksome features of the 19th-century works they emulated–and all the more palatable to modern readers as a result–but were utterly chaste, with mainly psychological, internal, and melancholy conflicts with precious little blood. They were regarded as suitable reading for all ages.

One would have thought that the counterculture movement that followed would have spelled the end of Dortmund’s popularity, but his books soon became newly popular in an ironic sense, with many readers delighting in the innuendo that could be found in his naive prose. This led the author to accentuate those features to an extent bordering on parody, alienating many earlier readers but gaining new ones.

There is much speculation on how Dortmund’s private life and sexuality influenced his later writings, but he was notoriously aloof and private even as he made himself available for regular public consultations with fans (the “Dortmund circle”).

When he died from a combination of pneumocystis pneumoni and Kaposi’s sarcoma in 1984, Dortmund’s executors found one last novel in his private safe (with instructions that it be published immidiately), along with a signed press release to be issued on the author’s death.

The press release ready, simply: “Be kind to animals, love one another honestly, and dream gothic dreams.”