Reading him feels, to me, like an act of almost shameful self-indulgence rich but sickly you feel you need a brisk walk afterwards. It was a strange place and he was a strange man – a hard writer to pin down: distinctly American, but hugely influential in European letters not technically a very brilliant writer, and yet the founder of half a dozen new literary genres. The museum was a creepy place, as you might imagine, with a lot of dark wood and eerie pictures and a strange garden that seemed to be in permanent shadow. At the time I don't think I had read any of his work, except perhaps The Raven. I remember visiting the Edgar Allan Poe museum the last time I was in Richmond, Virginia. Early poetic verses found written in a young Poe’s handwriting on the backs of Allan’s ledger sheets reveal how little interest Poe had in the tobacco business. Allan would rear Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe had dreams of being a writer in emulation of his childhood hero the British poet Lord Byron. Within three years of Poe’s birth both of his parents had died, and he was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia while Poe’s siblings went to live with other families. His other brother William Henry Leonard Poe would also become a poet before his early death, and Poe’s sister Rosalie Poe would grow up to teach penmanship at a Richmond girls’ school. The real Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston on January 19, 1809. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame the author’s name. He is seen as a morbid, mysterious figure lurking in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or crumbling castles. Just as the bizarre characters in Poe’s stories have captured the public imagination so too has Poe himself. Poe’s reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry. He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the science fiction genre, but he made his living as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. This versatile writer’s oeuvre includes short stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a book of scientific theory, and hundreds of essays and book reviews. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, and The Fall of the House of Usher.
The name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead.
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