Studying the short-story / Sixteen short-story classics with introductions, notes and a new laboratory study method for individual reading and use in colleges and schools.

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POE AND HIS WRITINGS

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, January 19, 1809. His father, of a good Maryland family, was an actor, and his mother an actress of English extraction. Both parents dying before Edgar was three, he, with his brother William and sister Rosalie, was left homeless in Richmond, where each found a protector. Mrs. Allan adopted Edgar, giving him his middle name, and bestowing at the same time every opportunity that wealth could offer. He was sent to school at Stoke Newington, England, attended a private school in Richmond, and entered the University of Virginia, but remained there less than a year, for his reckless and erratic temperament champed under the restraints of routine. He was placed in Mr. Allan’s counting-room, but ran away to enlist in the United States Army as “Edgar Allan Perry.” After the death of Mrs. Allan, her husband secured Poe’s discharge from the army and his appointment to West Point as a cadet, July 1, 1830; but after six months Poe contrived to be dismissed. He had already published his poems successfully, so he went to New York, in the early part of 1831, to begin his professional literary life. For four years—1833 to 1837—he wrote brilliantly for The Southern Literary Messenger, in Baltimore. Then he went successively to New York and Philadelphia, where he worked on various literary enterprises for six years. In 1844 he returned to New York, and became assistant to N. P. Willis, in whose journal, The Mirror, “The Raven” appeared in 1845. Poe’s literary reputation was now established both in America and abroad, most of his masterpieces having been created during the turbulent years of his wanderings. In 1835 he had been married to Virginia Clemm, his cousin, and her early death in 1847 broke his spirit. His health had already succumbed to his morbid temperament—which magnified every sorrow of his chaotic career—and to the excesses of drugs and drink. He died most unhappily, October 7, 1849, at the age of forty—a master spirit pitifully wrecked before his prime.

Poe was a remarkable poet, essayist, critic, and short-story writer. “The Raven,” “Lenore,” “Ulalume,” “The Bells,” “Annabel Lee,” “Israfel,” and “To One in Paradise” are among his best poems. Probably the greatest of his stories are, “MS. Found in A Bottle,” “The Assignation,” “Ligeia,” “The Murders in The Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” “A Descent into The Maelstrom,” “The Masque of The Red Death,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Gold Bug,” “The Black Cat,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” first published in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, September, 1839—and “The Purloined Letter,” first published in The Gift, an “annual,” in 1845.

Poe was the greatest conscious artist that American literature has ever known. He not only looked backward upon his own work and, as did Stevenson, clearly traced the operations of his mind in its production, but he built up a structure of literary theory which has been powerfully attacked, indeed, but whose walls remain substantially whole to-day. To his constructive criticism of the short-story is directly due its present advanced form, for while current practice has widely departed from Poe’s morbid, gloomy, extravagant themes and formal, abundant diction, his stories are still unsurpassed for vigor, atmosphere, invention, and thrill, and his laws of composition are read everywhere with the respect due authority.

Ah, dream too bright to last!
Ah, starry Hope, that didst arise
But to be overcast!
A voice from out the Future cries,
“Onward!”—but o’er the Past
(Dim gulf!) my spirit hovering lies,
Mute—motionless—aghast!

Edgar Allan Poe, The Assignation.

Had you lived a generation later, honor, wealth, applause, success in Europe and at home, would all have been yours.—Andrew Lang, Letters to Dead Authors.

There are literary evolutionists who, in their whim of seeing in every original writer a copy of some predecessor, have declared that Hawthorne is derived from Tieck, and Poe from Hoffmann.... If the adjective American has any meaning at all, it qualifies Poe and Hawthorne. They were American to the core. They both revealed the curious sympathy with Oriental moods of thought which is often an American characteristic. Poe, with his cold logic and his mathematical analysis, and Hawthorne, with his introspective conscience and his love of the subtle and the invisible, are representative of phases of American character not to be mistaken by any one who has given thought to the influence of nationality.... Nothing better of its kind has ever been done than the “Pit and the Pendulum,” or than the “Fall of the House of Usher” (which has been compared aptly with Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” for its power of suggesting intellectual desolation). Nothing better of its kind has ever been done than the “Gold Bug,” or than the “Purloined Letter,” or than the “Murders in the Rue Morgue.”—Brander Matthews, The Philosophy of the Short-story.

The conception of gloomy terror which impregnates “The House of Usher” is as complete as the idea of medieval chivalry underlying Ivanhoe.... To be sure, the terror in his stories, so he said in his preface to the Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque, was “not of Germany, but of the soul....” Yet one can readily believe that his Roderick in “The House of Usher,” who pored over books which had the “character of phantasm,” Morella, who was interested in the transcendentalism of Schelling and Fichte, Ægæus, whom “the realities of the world affected—as visions,” are all identical with the Young Poe when he freed his mind and later his fancy in the fields where Novalis sought the blue flower and all the German romanticists wandered.... To say that Poe was a creature of German influence would be absurd. To say that German thought and fancy were sympathetic to his genius, would be putting it too mildly. Between these extremes the truth must lie.—H. S. Canby, The Short Story in English.

FURTHER REFERENCES FOR READING ON POE

Prose Writers of America, Rufus W. Griswold (1870); Short Studies of American Authors, Thomas W. Higginson (1880); Letters to Dead Authors, Andrew Lang (1886); Criticisms on Contemporary Thought, Richard H. Hutton (1894); American Lands and Letters, Donald G. Mitchell (1897-99); Life of Edgar Allan Poe, R. H. Stoddard (1899); Poe and Some of His Critics, C. W. Hubner (1906); Life of Edgar Allan Poe, Personal and Literary, George E. Woodberry (1909); Edgar Allan Poe, A Critical Study, Arthur Ransome (1910).