Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman.

Neil Gaiman is a British writer who has earned critical praise and popular success through various writings that frequently feature a darkly humorous tone and works written for various ages. His work has included short stories, children's books, novels, graphic novels, and scripts for television and films. These works are often classified as genre works, including the horror, fantasy, and science fiction genres, but the works tend to blend multiple genres into a unique melange. Gaiman's work has shown, throughout his career, an understanding of the conventional rules of fiction, but he rarely follows such rules, preferring instead to flip convention and follow different paths, leading some to consider Nail Gaiman to be an author in the post-modernist tradition.

Neil Gaiman was born in Portchester, England, in 1960 to David Bernard Gaiman, who owned a family chain of stores, and Sheila Gaiman, a pharmacist. Both of his parents encouraged their son's early reading habit. In many interviews, Neil Gaiman has commented on his early love of reading and that he often could be found with a book in his hands. He has also frequently talked about the importance of libraries in enabling his voracious reading habit. His favorite authors, many discovered during his early reading, include C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, James Branch Campbell, Edgar Allan Poe, Michael Moorcock, Ursula K. LeGuin, Gene Wolfe, and G.K. Chesterton.

Gaiman's early education, despite his Jewish heritage, was at various church schools, including Fonthill School in East Grinstead, Ardingly College, and Whitgift School in Croydon. As a teenager, Gaiman found himself outgrowing the comic books he had loved as a child and began writing his own comics to fulfill his desire for more mature comics. Around the same time, he and his friend started a magazine called Metro. Their magazine was even able to get an interview with author Michael Moorcock.

After leaving school, Gaiman began a writing career as a freelance journalist. Part of his journalistic pursuits was to learn about the world and make connections that could later help him in getting published, by conducting interviews and reviewing books. One of these interviews included Terry Pratchett, which would begin an important relationship for Neil Gaiman's later career.

During this time, Gaiman was writing short stories and began reading British comic book writer Alan Moore's work, specifically The Swamp Thing. Alan Moore would have an impact on Gaiman's career, opening Gaiman's eyes to what comic books could be and that they can have the same amount of intelligence, depth, passion, and quality as other mediums.

Neil Gaiman's out-of-print biography of pop band Duran Duran.

By 1984, Neil Gaiman earned his first writer credit for a paperback biography of the music group Duran Duran. The biography took him three months to write and would eventually go out of print. Gaiman has said he hopes people do not read the book, and he has never allowed the biography to re-enter print, as he has said it is the worst thing he ever wrote. Copies of the biography have been resold on online auction sites for many times what they are worth.

In 1986, after an interview with author Douglas Adams in 1983, which developed a relationship between the two authors, Neil Gaiman wrote Don't Panic: The Official Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion about Douglas Adams and his famous The Hitchhiker's Guide the Galaxy.

Cover of Neil Gaiman's Violent Cases.

At about this time, Neil Gaiman met artist Dave McKean. The two collaborated on a graphic novel, Violent Cases, in 1987. This started a long relationship between the two and established both as rising stars in the comic book world, bringing them to the notice of publishers in the UK and the US. They would submit additional story and art treatments to DC Comics, which resulted in a 1988 miniseries called Black Orchid.

Along with graphic novels from Alan Moore and Frank Miller, published around the same time, Violent Cases and Black Orchid would be part of establishing the atmosphere for the DC Comics renaissance of the late 1980s. Further, more importantly for Neil Gaiman, Black Orchid showed there was a market for dark, mature stories written for an adult audience.

Main character of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman.

This led to the 1989 launch of Neil Gaiman's first major success, The Sandman. This was a new kind of comic and would become a flagship title for publisher Vertigo, an imprint launched by DC Comics to publish adult-themed horror and fantasy series. McKean stayed on as cover artist for the book's entire run, while rotating interior artists helped to flavor each story. These stories were unlike anything in mainstream comics up to this time. The protagonist was Morpheus, a manifestation of the ability of sentient beings to dream, and was a sibling to a pantheon of godlike beings with human foibles and drives known as the Endless.

The Sandman ran for seventy-five issues until 1996, and besides being a top-selling title, it also won a series of awards, including nine Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards and three Harvey Awards. In 1991, The Sandman became the first comic to receive a literary award, the 1991 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story. In 2003, Neil Gaiman revisited The Sandman characters with Endless Nights, an anthology of the series, which had the distinction of being the first graphic novel to earn a place on The New York Times best sellers list for hardcover fiction.

Following the success of The Sandman, Neil Gaiman went on to write a lot of comics. This included writing for various series, including multiple titles for Marvel: 1602 in 2004 and The Eternals in 2006. In his work on The Eternals, Neil Gaiman re-introduced the characters to the modern Marvel timeline, with a storyline during the events of Civil War, in which the Eternals character are struggling with the events of the Civil War and whether the immortal humanoids should be registered with the government (under the fictional Superhero Registration Act).

Cover of Gaiman's Miracleman.

During this time, Neil Gaiman also worked with Todd McFarlane after McFarlane launched his Image Comics studio and the Spawn series, in which he invited big-name guest authors. These guest authors included Neil Gaiman, who felt he deserved a share of the success of the Spawn series based on the contributions he made in the ninth issue for three critical characters. In 1997, reports suggested McFarlane and Gaiman had struck a deal, where McFarlane got the critical characters, and Gaiman got the rights to a character named Miracleman (or Marvelman in the UK). But the deal fell apart over reported trademark issues, and in 2002, Gaiman filed a lawsuit that lasted nearly a decade. The judgment was made in Gaiman's favor a decade after its filing.

While writing the comic series that dominated Neil Gaiman's early career, he continued to write short stories and story-poems. This eventually included a series of collections. Similarly, Gaiman wrote novels and books for adults and children, finding success with many of his adult fiction novels and his children's novels. These books have been adapted to film, television, stage, and streaming services and include Coraline, American Gods, Good Omens, and The Ocean at the End of the Lane.

Gaiman's books have been read by millions of readers and have been beloved due to their imaginative approach to fantasy and genre-blending. Many of his books are described as blendings of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and mythology, and replete with literary allusions that have led to users developing wikis online to explore those allusions and hints.

His work has won several awards and honors, including the British Fantasy Award, Locus Awards, Goodreads: Choice Awards Winner for Best Fantasy, Shirley Jackson Award, Hugo Awards, Nebula Awards, Newbery Medal, American Bookseller Association awards, Chicago Tribune Young Adult LIterary Prize, Dorothy Canfield Fisher Children's Book Award, IndieBound Award, Horn Book Honor, Bram Stoker Award, Mythopoeic Award, Geffen Award, among others. He has won many of these awards several times.

Around 1983, after his initial interview with Douglas Adams, Neil Gaiman began writing in a style that he has described as clean, funny, classic English humor. This reached about 5,000 words about William the Antichrist before Gaiman sent it to friends to read. One of those friends was Terry Pratchett, who would call Gaiman back about eight months later and ask him what he was doing with that 5,000 words.

Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett in 1991.

The two authors decided to collaborate on a book. Terry Pratchett took what was written and typed them into his word processer, expanding them into 10,000 words. The first draft, which the two authors passed between each other to write, was finished in about nine weeks. The second draft took about four months. The book, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch was published in 1990. This was Neil Gaiman's first novel, which would top the best-seller lists.

Following this, Neil Gaiman began writing a TV script, which morphed into a film script. The author became frustrated as the producer changed the script as scenes were changed when filming locations were lost, episodes were running too long, actors injured themselves and had to be written out of the series, and so on. Gaiman said his way of dealing with these challenges was to tell himself the original ideas would go in the novel, with the novel representing control over the process, but it would eventually turn into Neverwhere, which was published in 1996.

This was the first novel that bore only Gaiman's name, and it was successful and would be followed by Stardust, which followed a more fantastical narrative and would win the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature in its publication year (1999) and an Alex Award from the American Library Association in 2000. In 1993 and 1998, the short stories and poems Gaiman had been writing and publishing through the 1980s and 1990s were collected in two different collections: Angels and Visitations and Smoke and Mirrors, respectively.

Cover of American Gods.

Between 2001 and 2005, Neil Gaiman published two of his more popular adult fantasy novels: American Gods and Anansi Boys. American Gods is considered one of Gaiman's best-known works outside of his work in comic books. American Gods has been considered to capture the American spirit, representing an immigrant's view of America and Native Americans, and uses fantasy and the idea of old European gods being brought to America to explore how contemporary America was built. Anansi Boys is largely considered a sequel to American Gods; it is set in the same world but offers a mythology for the modern age, with prophecy, family dysfunction, mystical deceptions, and killer birds. It includes gods in the same way as American Gods and follows the son of Anansi, a trickster god.

Throughout his career, Neil Gaiman has worked on several different children's stories, beginning with the 1997 The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish. He also wrote the 2003 illustrated horror story The Wolves in the Walls, which was illustrated by McKean; the young-adult novel InterWorld written in 2007 with Michael Reaves; and the 2009 books Crazy Hair and Blueberry Girl, among others.

Gaiman's popular children's book Coraline.

None of these reached the success of Coraline. Published in 2002, Coraline is considered to be a masterful mix of various elements of the Brothers Grimm and Lewis Carroll into a modern fairy tale that mixes elements of magical realism, intrigue, mystique, and horror into the depiction of a typical American young girl: Coraline. The book went on to win several awards, including the ALA Best Book for Young Adults, Publishers Weekly Best Book, Hugo Award for Best Novella, and Bram Stoker Award for Best Work for Young Readers, among others. The book was adapted into an animated film in 2009.

In interviews, Neil Gaiman has said he tried to write The Graveyard Book much earlier in his life, but he realized he was not a good enough writer at twenty-four to finish the book or do the idea justice. Twenty years later, in 2008, he published The Graveyard Book. The book was the first ever to win both the Newbery Medal, the highest honor given to US children's literature, and the Carnegie Medal, the UK's highest honor for children's literature. The tale has been described as both sweet and macabre and tells the story of a young orphan raised by a cemetery full of ghosts.

Neil Gaiman with his first wife Mary McGrath and two of their eventual three children.

In 1983, Neil Gaiman and Mary McGrath, who he had met while living in East Grinstead, had their first child, Michael Gaiman. The couple married in 1985 and had their second child the same year, Holly Gaiman. A few years later, they welcomed their third child, daughter Madeleine Gaiman. The couple reportedly grew apart later in their marriage and divorced in 2007 after a long separation period. In 2011, Gaiman married American singer-songwriter Amanda Palmer after the couple had reportedly begun dating in 2009. They had a son, Anthony, in 2015.

Neil Gaiman photographed with Amanda Palmer.

The couple announced they were splitting up in 2020 after their marriage, which they had always kept open, had turned turbulent. Amanda Palmer summarized the marriage as working when they had things in common and not when they did not. Publicly, the couple stated they were trying to continue to make their marriage work. But by 2022, the couple officially announced their intent to divorce.