Who owns Edgar Allan Poe?
Throughout January, the world is Edgar Allan Poe's stage, 200 years after his birth on January 19, 1809, and more than a century and a half after his mysterious demise in a Baltimore gutter. He's credited as the founding father of detective fiction, a master of the macabre, the namesake inspiration for the mystery world's premier annual award, and perhaps the first proper full-time freelance writer. This second son of an acting couple might well feel a mix of puffed-up pride and mystification at the celebratory atmosphere if he were alive to witness it. He spent most of his life cobbling together a living out of the scraps of poetic and prose publication, sporadically climbing the mountain of literary acclaim (as with "The Raven" in 1845) only to plunge anew into penury, a state he remained in until his death.
Poe's perilous financial state made him a man on the move, and two centuries later his itinerant status has a number of cities fighting for the honour to claim him as theirs and only theirs. Baltimore, by virtue of being his burial ground, has long had the inside track; after all, on every anniversary since 1949, a mysterious individual known as "The Poe Toaster" has left cognac and three red roses at Poe's graveside. But then a 2007 cover story in the Philadelphia City Paper depicted, in tongue-in-cheek fashion, the kidnapping of Poe's corpse to be spirited away to Philadelphia, where Poe produced a great deal of his literary output. "We're Taking Poe Back," the article proclaimed, launching a long-running debate between its author, Edward Pettit, and Poe House curator Jeff Jerome.
The battle to be Poe's primary residence is hardly a two-horse race: There are also justifiable claims from the Bronx, where Poe lived out the last years of his life; Boston, where he was born; and Richmond, Virginia, where he spent his early childhood under the foster care of the Allan family. In other words, it'll be at least another 200 years before the Poe Wars reach a cease-fire.
But let's talk of love, for there's plenty of it in the air from a publishing industry eager to give Poe presents in the form of literary tributes, original stories and miniature biography. The last item in that list refers to the work of Peter Ackroyd, the British novelist and non-fiction writer who's made a career out of documenting the history of London and the complicated lives of notable figures like Chaucer, Shakespeare and Newton with assured brevity. Now he's done it again with "Poe: A Life Cut Short", which recounts Poe's tumultuous and peripatetic personal and professional life in a tone equal parts crisp and Gothic. Ackroyd's prose assumes the reader has some familiarity with signature works like "William Wilson" or "The Raven," so don't look for new revelations or fresh insights. The book works best as a refresher course for the curious rather than as a definitive study of Poe's importance in cross-Atlantic culture.
“He will appear in the enchanted garden,” Keith Kaufelt, a docent at the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, says with more certainty than should be warranted (seeing as how the person in question has been dead for 160 years). But on the bicentennial birthday of Edgar Allan Poe, the museum hoped to bring the master of mystery, king of rhyme-scheme and inventor of the detective-fiction genre back from the dead.
Boston College is holding its first ever Poe celebration, and Boston's mayor recently announced that the major intersection at South Charles and Boylston will soon be re-named Poe Square.
“His stories are universal,” says crime writer Michael Connelly. “They come from a place of loneliness and longing, and everybody can probably tap into that at some point in their life.” Connelly edited the collection of Poe stories put out for his bicentennial by the Mystery Writers of America, the organisation that pays annual homage to Poe by bestowing Edgar awards to the year's best mystery writers.
Connelly points out that while Poe had success late in his short life with the poem “The Raven,” during the majority of his 40 years he was broke and under-appreciated. “The full acknowledgment and accolades came after he died,” says Connelly.
Compiled by Cultural Correspondent
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