Kelley

What the teachers don't tell you...
In the current New Yorker magazine, an article about Edgar Allan Poe caught my attention. Murder, scarey talking birds, signs of death and cold windy nights. Suspense. Chills up the spine. Police and detective work. Ugly. That's what I remember of his works, the assigned reading in high school. The Raven, The Gold-Bug, A Telltale Heart...all are dark and murderous stories with twisted plots in rhythm. However, while it was quite obvious that he was a very strange man, living through two major economic crashes in the 1840s and dreary unemployment spikes in New York city, the teachers never really told us about this guy. About the man behind the words. He was bad. A chronic liar, he was blacklisted among New York publishers for attempting to write crazy, outlandish and false autobiographies. He got off on insulting his readers, and while extremely talented at writing puns and cryptograms, most all of his works were out to dupe the reader. He hated his audience! He showed up drunk at a New York city speaking event, tricking the audience by reading one of his childhood poems instead of the keynote address. He sought money, but he pretty much starved his whole life. His literary criticism reeked with mockery and debauchery, calling out the incredible authors of the time from James Fenimore Cooper to Margaret Fuller. He failed at every magazine he began or edited, and his life was quite sad. An orphan, his foster father disowned him after he lied and stole from the family. And he was found wasted outside a bar, having spent the only 10 bucks to his name, which was intended as a community donation to his sickly wife. She died of consumption. He died of, as if the finale to his life's work, "mysterious causes," just three years later. Stephen King calls Poe the granddaddy of detective fiction. But this granddaddy was a bad dude. Sometimes it's sad that an author or artist never became famous during their life, celebrity achieved only after they're gone. In Poe's case, it's sad that he became famous at all. Bad people should not live on. I'm sure this was not on the lesson plan...

Cindy

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