I just read that Dostoevsky said E.A. Poe was “an enormously talented writer” and based his detective in Crime and Punishment on Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin. I didn’t know that. I also didn’t know this:
Poe wrote most of his greatest works while living in Philadelphia. Tell-Tale Heart. Fall of the House of Usher. Black Cat. Murders in the Rue Morgue. Mystery of Marie Roget. Masque of Red Death. Gold Bug. Pit and the Pendulum. It was the city that transformed his genius into the greatness we all know and love. And I’m not talking about all that Liberty Bell, Birthplace of Independence crap. It was Philly’s gothic, chaotic environment in the early 19th century that had an indelible impact on the style and content of Poe’s work.
The doomed family of the House of Usher was conjured by Poe in Philadelphia. William Wilson and his evil doppelganger took form there. The madman of “The Tell-Tale Heart” made his murderous confession under the dark skies of the Quaker City. C. Auguste Dupin, the prototype of Sherlock Holmes and all fictional detectives to follow, sprung from Poe’s fertile pen while the author was reading the daily criminal mysteries that plagued the city. The detective/mystery story was invented in Philadelphia! (Why a mystery writer convention is held in any city but the one that invented the genre is beyond me, too.)
What did they teach me in school?
At least two major novels have been written about Poe recently; has anyone read either one?
– Source;
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5543300
– the ‘photograph’ of him is very strange.
I have not.
Goodness, how I love Poe’s stuff. Wish more people wrote like him today.
The daguerreotype at the top of the NPR story is the ultima thule picture (so named by Helen Whitman). I believe it was taken shortly after a suicide attempt with laudanum.
Most of the extant pictures or copies of pictures that we have of Poe were taken of him late in life and in some cases (as with the ultima thule)when he ill.
I doubt the Philadelphia environment had much to do with the writing of Poe’s stories, so far as their quality is concerned. That’s something typically governed more time and circumstance, and an author’s best works are commonly grouped together in a single period:
Lovecraft’s best-known stories are clustered in the period 1926-1931. Ambrose Bierce wrote most of his stories relatively late in life (in his 40s-50s, I think) and when he was working for Hearst’s Examiner and Cosmopolitan. And I seem to remember that Dostoyevsky wrote his most characteristic work after his reprieve from execution and imprisonment in Siberia.