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Henry would make a career of, “The Oval Portrait” is an early “shocker” even though contemporary audiences will see the conclusion coming a mile away. “Berenice” and “Eleonora”, two character studies of doomed women, both epitomizing some of Poe’s most persistent fixations (teeth, premature burial). If it’s good enough for Melville, it’s good enough for everyone. Jorge Luis Borges loved it, Jules Verne was undoubtedly influenced and without this model, we may not have gotten our great (white) American novel. Here we celebrate Poe’s ten greatest tales, but first, a brief sample of tales that don’t quite make the cut, but warrant attention and approbation.įirst and foremost, the almost unclassifiable (and Poe’s only novel-length work) “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket”. He stands alone, still, at the top of a darkened lighthouse, unable to promise a happy ending and half-insane from what he’s seen. The reason Poe remains so convincing and unsettling is because he doesn’t rely on goblins or scenarios that oblige the suspension of belief he is himself the madman, the stalker, the outcast, the detective and, above all, the artist who made his life’s work a deeper than healthy dive into the messy engine of human foibles, obsessions and misdeeds. Put more plainly, this was a time when being accidentally buried alive was something that could conceivably occur. With no Snopes or MythBusters, encyclopedias not readily available and religion the common if inconsistent arbiter of moral guidance, Poe was not after cheap frights so much as uncovering the collective unconscious. Well, Poe was writing in an era that was pre- radio and practically pre-daguerreotype. When we talk about old school we typically call to mind an era that was pre-TV and even pre-movie. Or, put another way, we must remember that before certain things became clichés, they were unarticulated concerns and compulsions. When assessing Poe, 150-plus years after he died, it’s imperative to interrogate and untangle that fact that not all clichés are created equally.
#EDGAR ALLAN POE FAMOUS BOOKS MANUAL#
He also happened to be a first rate critic, and his insights are as astute and insightful as anything being offered in the mid-19th Century (his essay “The Poetic Principle” comes as close to a “how to” manual for aspiring writers as Orwell’s justly celebrated “Politics and the English Language”). More, his insights into psychology, both as narrative device and metaphysical exercise, are considerable he was describing behavior and phenomena that would become the stuff of textbooks several decades after his death. The entire genres of horror, science fiction and detective story might be quite different, and not for the better, without Poe’s example.
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Suffice it to say, if your work has any part in shaping or inspiring authors who make significant contributions to the canon, your status is more than secure.Īrguably, no American figure has influenced as many brilliant - and imitated - writers as Poe. Wells, Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson, Herman Melville, Arthur Conan Doyle, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and a trio of tolerably impressive non-Americans: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Oscar Wilde and Sigmund Freud.
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Perhaps the best way to gain historical perspective on the proper scope of Poe’s achievements and influence is to consider an abbreviated list of legends who stood on his doleful shoulders: French poet Charles Baudelaire (who both championed and translated Poe), H.G. Some might claim Poe gets too much credit for perfecting (if not inventing) the American short horror story and detective story. With vices and an intensity that would give even a young Charles Bukowski pause, and would have buried the punk rock poseur Sid Vicious, Poe managed to be for literature what Miles Davis was for jazz: he didn’t merely set new standards, he changed the course of subsequent art, perfecting entirely new paradigms in the process. If his work and his life (and most especially his death) seem clichéd, dying young, debauched and with too little money was not yet the career move it would eventually become for other artists. In any event, Poe was a pioneer in almost too many ways to count. Like others who have done things first, and best, it’s likely we grow more impatient with their imitations than the original. If Edgar Allan Poe - and his writing - has not aged well and seems more than a little passé for 21st century sensibilities, it’s not entirely his fault.