Salon.com > Edgar Allan Poe

Gloomy nevermore? Portrait shows cheerful Poe

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 17:06:00 +0000

Edgar Allan Poe's fertile imagination has endured for more than 150 years -- and so has his pale, death-haunted image, with his sunken eyes, a trim mustache and unruly mop of curly hair.

However, scholars say Poe looked far more vigorous, perhaps even dashing, in his earlier years than he does in the well-known series of daguerreotypes taken in the final years of his life.

The more robust Poe is captured in a small watercolor by A.C. Smith, one of just three surviving portraits of the author, which will be shown publicly for the first time Saturday and is expected to fetch tens of thousands of dollars at auction.

Poe sits at a desk with pen and paper in hand, seemingly at the height of his creative powers. His upper lip is clean-shaven, though he sports long, bushy sideburns. And there's the slightest hint of a smile on his face.

"It actually represents Poe as he appeared to his contemporaries -- a handsome, sophisticated young man on the rise," said Cliff Krainik, the owner of the portrait and a Poe scholar. "The daguerreotypes show him in his rather dissipated state, where he has gone through the difficulties of his life."

Copy of Poe’s 1st book sells for $662K

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 08:01:00 +0000

A rare copy of Edgar Allan Poe's first book has sold for $662,500, smashing the previous record price for American literature.

The copy of "Tamerlane and Other Poems" had been estimated to sell Friday for between $500,000 and $700,000 at Christie's auction house in New York City.

The previous record is believed to be $250,000 for a copy of the same book sold nearly two decades ago.

The 40-page collection of poems was published in 1827. Poe wrote the book shortly after moving to Boston to launch his literary career.

No more than 40 or 50 copies of "Tamerlane" were printed, and only 12 remain.

The record-breaking copy is stained and frayed and has V-shaped notches on the outer and lower margins.

Literary Daybook, April 1

Mon, 01 Apr 2002 19:01:00 +0000

Today in fiction

On April 1, 1800, Stephen Maturin challenges Jack Aubrey to a duel; a great friendship ensues.
-- "Master and Commander" (1969)
by Patrick O' Brian

From "The Book of Fictional Days"
Know when something that did not really happen
occurred? Send it to fictiondays@yahoo.com.

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Today in Literary History
On this day in 1841, Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" was published in Philadelphia's Graham's Magazine. It is generally considered to be the first detective story, although as the word "detective" did not yet exist, Poe called this "a tale of ratiocination." Though he realized that he had "something in a new key," Poe could not have known that he was giving the nascent genre many of its prototypes: the "locked-room" crime, the gentleman-amateur detective, the sidekick-narrator, and others. The story also gave a boost to both the fledgling Graham's and the struggling author -- in Poe's case, bringing him popularity not only at home but in France, where several magazines were caught trying to pass the story off as their own.

Bad real estate

Fri, 15 Dec 2000 20:00:00 +0000

The adage insists that there are really only two stories in the world: The hero leaves town, or a stranger comes to town. I would add, as a variation, that the hero gets stuck in a bad, bad place -- maybe even with a stranger. While movies may seem to have the monopoly on bad real estate ("Rosemary's Baby," "Poltergeist"), literature itself sports a long tradition of spaces you love to hate, even before Charles Dickens' "Bleak House." (Indeed, most of Dickens earns honorable mention on this grantedly idiosyncratic list.)

The Collected Tales and Poems Edgar Allan Poe
The father of all bad real estate. The crumbling, moldy, moss-sprouting walls in "The Fall of the House of Usher," the torture chamber in "The Pit and the Pendulum," the lavish but still-infected Prospero Palace in "The Masque of the Red Death" (a no-one-is-safe story I remember whenever I read about gated communities being burglarized): Poe is a catalog of real estate woes. You can't even trust the walls, which tend to close in to bury you alive.

“The Raven”

Wed, 01 Nov 2000 01:00:00 +0000

American master of terror Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston in 1809 to professional actors who died when Poe was a child. He attended the University of Virginia, where he was a distinguished student and developed his lifelong taste for liquor. Afterward, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and rose to the rank of sergeant major. He was expelled from West Point after a year, blighting his hopes of becoming a career officer.

Poe started publishing his poetry and stories in the early 1830s and pursued a career in journalism to ensure some sort of financial security. In 1843, he published several works, including "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Gold Bug," which won a $100 prize in a contest sponsored by the Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper. The story made Poe famous with the fiction-reading public. His poem "The Raven," which appeared in the New York Evening Mirror in January 1845, was a critical and commercial success. "The Fall of the House Of Usher" (1839) and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841) are arguably two of his best short stories. But both Poe's and his wife Virginia's poor health kept the pair in financial and emotional distress. Poe died in 1849.

Along with "To Helen" and "Annabel Lee," "The Raven" is considered one of Poe's finest poems. Read by Basil Rathbone, one of Hollywood's greatest screen actors, this recording of "The Raven" from Harper Audio's The Edgar Allen Poe Collection describes the "stately" black bird that hauntingly repeats to his poet's desperate questions: "Nevermore."

(Corbis photo)

Roger Corman

Tue, 13 Jun 2000 12:53:00 +0000

There's a scene in the 1960 film "Little Shop of Horrors" in which the bloodthirsty talking plant, Audrey Junior, takes about five seconds to hypnotize the hapless flower-shop assistant, Seymour Krelboin, who's a tad squeamish about supplying the plant's dinner again: "Krelboin! Turn around! Close your eyes. You are asleep. Open your eyes. Now you will do as I say." Roger Corman's method as a director and producer has often seemed about as delicate as Audrey Junior's -- logic and continuity tend to go by the board in Corman's drive to achieve maximum eventfulness. Still, he's always managed to entertain the masses, devoting a long career to answering their cry of "Feed me!"

Corman's been known for several decades as "the King of the B's," as in B-movies -- the cinematic world of papier-mbchi aliens, mad sorcerers, car chases, exploding heads and topless outdoor catfights. But zoom in on the ceremonies for the 1974 Academy Awards: Francis Ford Coppola won Oscars for best picture, director and adapted screenplay for "The Godfather Part II," Robert Towne won the best original screenplay award for "Chinatown," and Jack Nicholson, Talia Shire and Diane Ladd were among the acting nominees. What they had in common was that they'd all worked for Roger Corman as wet-eared novices in the '50s and '60s.

The tell-tale cipher

Wed, 08 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000

For Edgar Allan Poe, dying did not necessarily leave a person speechless. Take "The Case of M. Valdemar." The title character, his body decomposing into "a nearly liquid mass of loathsome -- of detestable putrescence," still manages enough tongue to beg the narrator, a mesmerist, to stop messing with him.

"'For God's sake! -- quick! -- quick! -- put me to sleep -- or, quick! -- waken me! -- quick! -- I say to you that I am dead!'"

To say that speaking from beyond the grave was a Poe obsession would be understating the case. Some scholars believe he is trying to speak to us still by way of cryptography, a system of secret writings based on a predetermined set of symbols. Poe left behind one cryptograph that has remained unsolved for more than 150 years, waiting like a corked time capsule for someone to unlock its tangle of symbols.

Whether the cryptograph in question was written by Poe remains a mystery, perhaps the last involving an author whose "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is considered the first modern detective story. As that sagacious inquisitor, Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin, would say, "Let us enter into some examinations for ourselves, before we make up an opinion respecting them. An inquiry will afford us amusement." The details are as follows.