Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Edgar Allan Poe
There is much talk today about online piracy, but 19th century authors like Melville, Dickens, and Poe struggled financially because of the lack of international copyright law.
“Yes, I read the illegal translation,” a Czech Internet correspondent known as “Hustey” wrote last summer, when the next, eagerly awaited book in J. K.
Old-style politics and the death of Edgar Allan Poe
The whole campaign was a sham. It pitted a well-known Washington insider, an incumbent too smart for his own good, against a candidate from the Western boondocks who many thought was simply not up to the job and whom others suspected of having used mind-altering substances.
The American master of horror fiction was as peculiar in his life as he was in his writing.
Among the presents that came Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s way during the Christmas season of 1936 was a skull from an Indian burial ground. The gift was appropriate for a lifelong connoisseur of the weird.
The urge to create literature was as strong in the mid-1800s as it is today, but rejections were brutal and the pay was even worse.
How does the writing life in pre-Civil War America compare with that of the 1980s?
The city has been a lure for millions, but most of the great American minds have been appalled by its excesses. Here an eminent observer, who knows firsthand the city’s threat, surveys the subject.
EVERY THURSDAY , when I leave my apartment in a vast housing complex on Columbus Avenue to conduct a university seminar on the American city, I reflect on a double life—mine.
The young poet became a legendary plebe in the few painful months he spent at West Point
One morning in June, 1830, Edgar Allan Poe rode the steamer from New York up the Hudson River to West Point. His spirits, like his expectations, were uncharacteristically high.
Poe’s witticism was not meant kindly, but it was actually a compliment. Without doubt Margaret Fuller stood first among women of the nineteenth century.
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