Edgar Allan Poe

In America, we’re trained from a young age to equate Edgar Allan Poe with both terror and Halloween.  In my experience, reading Poe in an English class was something of a yearly ritual, even if the rationale for the exercise was rather forced.  Poe clearly enjoys a better literary reputation than our other horror master, Lovecraft — but only a marginally better one.  Despite the ubiquity with which Poe dominated my education while growing up, once I entered college and began reading “Literature”, Poe was ignored almost as thoroughly by my profs as he had been taught by my gradeschool teachers.  If we did read him, we did so only to devote the briefest of discussions to his work, and always in the context of establishing some other writer’s superiority with one literary element or another.

Of course, Poe has entered into the mainstream of American culture in a way that few writers have experienced.  Almost all of his major stories have been adapted in some form or another to television or film, from several silent films of the 1920s and 30s to the (in)famous Roger Corman adaptation of “The Fall of the House of Usher” with Vincent Price in 1960, and the fantastic Simpson’s adaptation of “The Raven” for the first “Treehouse of Horror” episode.  Even the Baltimore Ravens have three mascots, named Edgar, Allan, and Poe.  [click to continue…]

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