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

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/03/13/edgar-allan-poe-biography-kopley-review/

by apollinaire • 1 year ago

132 69 1 year ago

washingtonpost.com

barbazoo• 1 year ago

https://archive.ph/GHV3i

porkbrain• 1 year ago

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

fixprix• 1 year ago

He also had a theory pretty close to the big bang in Eureka. It offended a lot of people at the time

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka:_A_Prose_Poem

robin_reala4• 1 year ago

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... )

glimshe• 1 year ago

Very cool. Are the cover images made with AI or classic paintings?

robin_reala4• 1 year ago

Classic paintings: everything used on Standard Ebooks productions is old enough to be in the US public domain. The artists are in the colophons if you want to find out more.

spike021• 1 year ago

thanks for your work! i was just thinking the other day it had been a while (since university days) since i read his work and i happen to be taking a long-haul flight this week, so need something to read.

janetmissed• 1 year ago

tysm for contributing to standard ebooks, one of my favorite things on the whole internet

the_florist2• 1 year ago

Many thanks to each of you editors for the sterling work!

I was recently inspired to embark on a project to mirror the Standard Ebooks library, starting with a book that you produced, which happens to be my favorite:

https://flowery.app/books/edgar-allan-poe/short-fiction

Once the business achieves ramen profitability, the next milestone will be to give back with a corporate sponsorship.

robin_reala4• 1 year ago

Looks good! One minor point: it looks like some of your conversion isn’t keeping accurate styling. For example, if you look at the letter in https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/edgar-allan-poe/short-fict... that starts with “In conformity with an order” you’ll see (in Firefox and Chrome, Safari’s in the process of adding the styling) that the address is 90º as per the original scans. The same in https://flowery.app/books/edgar-allan-poe/short-fiction/thou... falls back to normal display, which is fine but perhaps a little bit of a shame.

timonofathens• 1 year ago

If you prefer a physical book, I can recommend: http://www.everymanslibrary.co.uk/classics-author.aspx?lette...

(Not affiliated, I just really like Everyman's Library)

codr7• 1 year ago

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

Mistletoe2• 1 year ago

I wonder what he would choose if he knew? A comfortable long life and happiness or to be remembered forever?

echelon2• 1 year ago

"long life" is geologically just wishful thinking. We all have the same quality of life outcome when compared against the vastness of time.

What is a billionaire's lavish life to the toil of an artist, inventor, or revolutionary? We all wind up rotting in the blink of an eye. Luxury, pleasure, and dopamine are as fleeting as youth.

It's better to do something of note.

doctorhandshake• 1 year ago

I don’t remember where I read it but I heard David Lynch recounting a conversation with his doctor in which he asked if being prescribed antidepressants could interfere with his creativity. The doctor said he couldn’t rule it out, so Lynch decided he’d rather deal with the symptoms of depression.

triceratops• 1 year ago

He may not actually be remembered forever. It hasn't even been 150 years since he died.

EDIT: He died in 1849 so it hasn't even been 200 years.

ndsipa_pomu2• 1 year ago

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.

keiferski• 1 year ago

I took a detective fiction course in college and Rue Morgue was indeed the first story we read.

shortrounddev2• 1 year ago

He was also the primary influence on HP Lovecraft

ndsipa_pomu2• 1 year ago

Absolutely. I think that's more well known though, he wrote that Poe was his "God of fiction". His influence on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne and H G Wells is probably less well know. He was also a big influence on Alfred Hitchcock who wrote "It's because I liked Edgar Allan Poe's stories so much that I began to make suspense films".

DevDesmond• 1 year ago

There is a Sci-Fi Noir TV show "Altered Carbon" (based on a book) featuring an AI using Edgar Allan Poe as their persona.

That Edgar Allan Poe is seminal in both genres makes me appreciate an already amazing character that much more! I would 10/10 recommend anyone watch season one of the series.

This thread now has me tempted to finally get into reading Poe himself, (among Lovecraft and the Altered Carbon books for more Poe influenced writing).

defrost2• 1 year ago

You might also enjoy Flow Like Poe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8Z0VynTR84

bmm6o• 1 year ago

What's interesting is that Poe is not in the Altered Carbon book. The hotel was called the Hendrix and its avatar was Jimi the guitarist. They couldn't get image rights for the film, so had to change it. But i agree that atmospherically and thematically Poe is a better fit.

slowtrek• 1 year ago

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.

TheAtomic• 1 year ago

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

gcheong• 1 year ago

Maybe just read the article through the archive link instead?

sometimes_all• 1 year ago

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.

Loughla• 1 year ago

The cask was my introduction to him as well. Then straight into Arthur Gordon Pym. It is still my favorite book, forever.

light_triad• 1 year ago

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

moomin• 1 year ago

From Epic Rap Battles of History:

Masque of the Red Death? Barely blood curdling.

Pit and the Pendulum? Not even unnerving.

Perving on your first cousin when she's thirteen years old? Now that's disturbing!

bobsmooth• 1 year ago

It's important to remember that ERB is comedy and not actual history. Poe loved his cousin like a daughter.

phoh• 1 year ago

"democracy dies in darkness"

0xbadcafebee• 1 year ago

Poe, insanity, and containing the feminine monstrous (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-0486-4), The Dollop ep.1 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueyw-pACTM8), ep.2 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGo53U2csMI)

Hard to read his work now without thinking about how much of a douche he was

lqet• 1 year ago

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.

tetris11• 1 year ago

Through all his binges and bankruptcies, through every setback and depressive spell, he kept making art because he knew that’s where the best of him lay.

This hits really close to home.

DeathArrow• 1 year ago

Many lives of talented poets and artists were a mess. Many died young. I still don't know whether living a life of misery leads to artistic mastery or not.

muzani2• 1 year ago

I feel like the main problem is it pays terribly. Most of the best ones were basically broke. But movie stars and pop stars are the opposite. They live in mansions and end up dying young anyway.

Maybe great art just requires being deep in flow to the point you neglect everything around you.

gabriel666smith• 1 year ago

I think that a vocation - artistic or otherwise - creates a place of safety in any kind of chaos. Life can be as bad as it is, but so long as you believe: “on the page, things are good”, you can always go to work.

I’m not sure if suffering leads to vocation, or if vocation induces neglect of the world that sits outside of that vocation, causing suffering.

From my experience (certainly not Poe-tier) the causality is complicated - a cycle, probably starting with a little of both.

simonebrunozzi• 1 year ago

https://archive.is/unrX4

ssake• 1 year ago

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_...

shreyshnaccount• 1 year ago

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.

iaaan• 1 year ago

Not at all, I think it's certainly worth pointing out. Regular people (like the author of this article, presumably) often end up inadvertently parroting the agendas that have been instilled into them, consciously or not.

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

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