The legendary award winning author who is best known for creating Norman Bates and his dear mother would have been 101 today. Psycho is certainly Bloch's most famous work, but throughout his life he wrote hundreds of short stories, over 30 novels, and over a dozen screenplays. He corresponded with H.P. Lovecraft who encouraged his writing which would eventually be published in the seminal magazine Weird Tales. The quote that accompanies this illustration is one of his most famous and often erroneously attributed to Stephen King.
Bloch was famous (or infamous) for his macabre sense of humor and was a perpetual punster. This is certainly evident in the titles of his collections such as Tales in a Jugular Vein, Such Stuff as Screams Are Made Of and Out of the Mouths of Graves. He left our world on September 23 1994 and the previous month he typed notes for his obituary, saying he did not want to cheat readers out of a surprise ending. In those notes, he specified that his ashes be placed in a book-shaped urn at the University of Wyoming with the inscription The Collected Works Of Robert Bloch.