Edgar Allan Poe's life was a mess. But his work was in his command

I produced CC0 ebook compilations of Poe’s short fiction and poetry for Standard Ebooks if anyone is interested in diving deeper into his writing: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/edgar-allan-poe

(I’d also recommend Leonid Andreyev’s short fiction; he’s often referred to as Russia’s Poe: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/leonid-andreyev/short-fict... )

https://archive.ph/GHV3i

He was also into cryptography: https://www.cs.trincoll.edu/~crypto/historical/poe.html

Here’s a great reading of The Masque of the Red Death:

https://youtu.be/FskFXD-SQpI?si=UYapck6_51LcAi9y

The Simpsons did a famous rendition of The Raven read by James Earl Jones:

https://youtu.be/ifhvfdqLLa8?si=xYL_XV5EDaT8RV9c

Alternatively, his life was exactly what it had to be for him to do what he was supposed to.

I was introduced to Poe via "The Cask of Amontillado". After that, I binge-watched The Fall of the House of Usher when it released, which is a mash-up of a lot of Poe's stories (the show didn't have the subtlety of the original work, but was a lot of fun). Now I'm reading all his short stories.

His work is really cool, and I wish I read him earlier.

Although Edgar Allan Poe is well known, I think his influence is under appreciated. He pretty much invented the detective story genre with "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and his "Eureka: A Prose Poem" was early sci-fi that more or less invented the idea of the Big Bang.

Someone should summarize for Poe fans who don't support WaPo.

I've discovered that Edgar Allan Poe's claim to "The Raven" was a scam. He actually had nothing to do with either writing it, or with its premiere publication. He merely scooped it by three days, replacing the real author's pseudonym with his own name. The real author had been Mathew Franklin Whittier, younger brother of the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier, who wrote it based on real-life circumstances. You can find my evidence and argument at this URL: https://www.academia.edu/49095038/Evidence_that_Edgar_Allan_...

Was just reading about Churchill's alcoholism in a bio and looks like Poe was right there with him on that front. My favorite Poe visual is the The Masque of the Red Death. Probably wrote it blasted out of his mind.

I was mildly interested in poetry as an adolescent, and "discovering" Poe in the English original (I was only aware of bad translations) had quite an impact on my young, impressionable brain. I still have large parts of "The Raven" and "Annabel Lee" memorized, 20 years later. After Poe, it was hard for me to take writers seriously who just inserted line breaks into prose texts and called it poetry.

It's a good article, but the headline feels a bit off considering the source. The idea of personal responsibility has been co-opted by corporations in the past to deflect from systemic issues, so seeing it framed this way- especially given the ownership and agenda of WP- feels a little manipulative. Though, to be fair, I am almost certainly over-analyzing it.