The most overrated writer in America

There is a large contingent of people in America who occasionally read classic literature for fun. I debated a bit with my followers on Notes about the exact size of this contingent, and we decided it was probably somewhere between two and ten million people in size.

Definitions are somewhat important here: When I say 'classic literature' I'm referring to any book that's written before 1980 and is marketed as a classic. I would not consider the novels of Georgette Heyer or Isaac Asimov to be classics, because they're not marketed as classics. Something like Raymond Chandler I'd consider a classic just because that's how he tends to be marketed.

Let's leave quality aside. I think Georgette Heyer is great. I am not talking about actual literary merit. I am talking about 'classic' as a socially-constructed category of books. To some extent it's a marketing category. It consists of old books that have endured, purportedly, because of their literary merit, as defined by literary critics and university professors. It’s my contention that there is a large group of people who use that marketing category to choose which books they want to read for pleasure.

Thus, whenever I talk about the reputation of a writer, I’m not talking about mere name-recognition in the general public at large, I’m talking about whether that author has a strong and enthusiastic set of fans amongst the several-million-strong classics-readers of America. John Steinbeck and J.D. Salinger have very high name-recognition amongst the general public, but their fandom within the sphere of classics-readers is surely much less than the fandom for Hemingway, Faulkner, and Melville.¹

---

A writer’s reputation amongst classics-readers is related to, but separate from, their reputation amongst academics. When it comes to the classics, there is a symbiotic relationship between professors and classics-readers. Many classics are not regularly taught in schools and colleges. Middlemarch is almost never taught, for instance, because it's too long. The same is true of David Copperfield. To the extent that there is a living interest in these books, it is because people read them for pleasure.

That living interest is exactly why professors can spend their careers studying something like Middlemarch. It's because there's some kind of general interest in that author. The lack of that living interest is why it's comparatively harder to study Washington Irving or James Fenimore Cooper.

Amongst this group of several million classics-readers, there are a lot of books that have a passionate fandom. Middlemarch is one of these books. So is Moby-Dick. I can tell when I write about certain books that there is a lot of interest, because the post generates a lot of excitement, a lot of comments, a lot of people sharing their own experience with that work.

Classics-readers are heterogenous. Most of them are interested in novels, but there is a distinct split between those who are interested in modernist novels versus 19th-century novels. When it comes to books before the 19th-century, I observe somewhat less interest. There is a fair amount of interest in the Greek classics, particularly The Iliad and The Odyssey. There is a bit of interest in the Greek tragedians and in Herodotus and Thucydides. But I find that there is very little interest in the Latin classics: amongst pleasure-readers, not even Cicero has a particularly strong constituency, much less Ovid, Catullus, Vergil.

When it comes to English literature, there is a fair amount of interest in Shakespeare and Milton, but not much in other English writers from before 1800, and very little interest in The Canterbury Tales, much less in other middle-English and old-English works.

Amongst classics-readers in 21st-century America, there is comparatively little interest in Eastern works. There's very little interest in even The Tale of Genji, much less Romance of the Three Kingdoms or Story of the Stone. The only major exception are 20th-century Japanese writers: Soeseki, Tanizaki, Kawabata, Abe, Mishima, etc. These seem to have a relatively strong constituency in the United States.

There's nothing good or bad here. I think it makes sense that English-speaking people would be interested in reading works originally composed in English. And that we would be most interested in works that seem to have had the most influence on our own culture. I'm just stating my understanding of how the world of the classics works.

---

All of this framework is just a very long preamble for me to say: interest in Edgar Allan Poe is soft.

People are not really reading this guy!

When I post about Poe, there is a distinct lack of excitement. I've been on Notes for days now, asking, "Does anyone out there actually love E.A. Poe?" When I posted about Melville and Twain, I heard back from a lot of people. There was a lot of love.²

With Poe, there's not so much love. Lots of people say they bounced off him. Lots of people say they loved a few stories. Lots of people say they dislike him. A few people say they love him, but compared to his level of prominence in pop-culture (there is a football team named after a poem he wrote), this guy's reputation is soft. He's got more name recognition than genuine love.

---

Okay...just so we’re on the same page: Edgar Allan Poe was a writer in early 19th-century America. He died in 1839, so he lived somewhere in between the 1820s heyday of James Fenimore Cooper and the big pre-war boom in American fiction that happened in the 1850s. When Poe was writing, American fiction was just getting going. There were lots of journals, lots of newspapers, comparatively more novels being published, but...there was also a lot of insecurity about whether there was a truly distinctive American literary sensibility, and, as a practical matter, you still needed a reputation abroad in order to be fully established.

Poe's father, mother and grandmother were actors. His dad abandoned the family when he was a year old, and his mother died shortly thereafter. He was fostered into a wealthy Virginia family, but never formally adopted, and he quarreled quite frequently with his foster father over money and the fact that Poe was generally sort of a scamp.³ Poe went to military school and briefly served as an officer, before talking his way into a discharge. Then he embarked on a career as a man of letters. In this position, he edited various literary periodicals, where he was a prolific reviewer and literary critic.

Poe was an extremely harsh critic, known during his life as "The Tomahawk Man" because he would chop every book to bits. He hated didacticism in fiction and thought that a story should aim at beauty above all else: I’m sure he would’ve hated Uncle Tom’s Cabin.⁴

---

He also wrote approximately 70 short stories. His main innovation seems to have been "the tale of ratiocination", which was a story about problem-solving. Some of these tales of ratiocination read as a kind of sci-fi, like "A Descent Into The Maelstrom", which is about using physics principles to escape from a maelstrom, or "The Unparalleled Adventure of Hans Pfaal", which imagines in exhaustive detail how you can use a balloon to reach the moon.

Some of these tales of ratiocination are thrillers, like "The Gold-Bug", about a search for buried treasure, or detective stories, like "The Purloined Letter", where Auguste Dupin is hired to find a stolen letter.

The important thing to know about the tales of ratiocination is...they're not that fun to read. You want to love them more than you do. If you've read a lot of science fiction or detective novels, as I have, then these stories just don't do it. They just don't have that spice.

The stories that do have the spice are Poe's Gothic or sensation tales. He didn’t invent this style of fiction, but he did take it in a distinctly new direction, highlighting what he called “the perverse”.

There's about ten of his sensation tales that are truly good:

• The Fall of the House of Usher

• William Wilson

• Masque of the Red Death

• The Tell-Tale Heart

• The Black Cat

• The Cask of Amontillado

• Hop-Frog

• The Oval Portrait

• The Facts In The Case of M. Valdemar

• The Man In The Crowd

Then there are about four of his jokey or satirical stories that are also quite good.

• King Pest

• How To Write A Blackwood Article

• Never Bet The Devil Your Head

• The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether

After these fourteen stories, I found the drop-off in quality to be quite steep, but several of his tales of ratiocination are worth reading just so you can see the form. The best of these are:

• The Purloined Letter

• The Pit And The Pendulum

• Descent Into The Maelstrom

---

His reputation is built on these Gothic tales. Here his innovation is that they seem to exist in truly amoral universes, where there is no justice, no goodness, and where people behave in strange, perverse ways seemingly for no reason. The best of these stories will stay with you for the rest of your life. "The Tell-Tale Heart" is a story you were probably assigned in school, and I am sure you can remember the image of the murder victim's one peculiar filmy-blue "vulture eye".

For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture—a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees—very gradually—I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.

All of his best sensation tales have that one striking image, like that of the revellers falling dead in "Masque of the Red Death":

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

Or the slow, deliberate bricking-up of the wall in "Cask of Amontillado":

I had scarcely laid the first tier of my masonry when I discovered that the intoxication of Fortunato had in a great measure worn off. The earliest indication I had of this was a low moaning cry from the depth of the recess. It was not the cry of a drunken man. There was then a long and obstinate silence. I laid the second tier, and the third, and the fourth; and then I heard the furious vibrations of the chain.

These three stories are honestly the best of the thirty-five or so stories that I read by Poe. They're told relatively plainly. They're simple, clear tales, without a lot of purple verbiage that's full of obscure foreboding.

Good Poe is excellent. It's just that he's so rarely good! In many of his Gothic tales, he writes more like this:

Berenice and I were cousins, and we grew up together in my paternal halls. Yet differently we grew—I, ill of health, and buried in gloom—she, agile, graceful, and overflowing with energy; hers, the ramble on the hill-side—mine the studies of the cloister; I, living within my own heart, and addicted, body and soul, to the most intense and painful meditation—she, roaming carelessly through life, with no thought of the shadows in her path, or the silent flight of the raven-winged hours. Berenice!—I call upon her name—Berenice!—and from the gray ruins of memory a thousand tumultuous recollections are startled at the sound! Ah, vividly is her image before me now, as in the early days of her light-heartedness and joy! Oh, gorgeous yet fantastic beauty! Oh, sylph amid the shrubberies of Arnheim! Oh, Naiad among its fountains! And then—then all is mystery and terror, and a tale which should not be told. Disease—a fatal disease, fell like the simoon upon her frame; and, even while I gazed upon her, the spirit of change swept over her, pervading her mind, her habits, and her character, and, in a manner the most subtle and terrible, disturbing even the identity of her person! Alas! the destroyer came and went!—and the victim—where is she? I knew her not—or knew her no longer as Berenice.

It’s just too much. The impression of foreboding is conveyed, by a cavalcade of vague, gloomy, emotional words. A guy is married to a woman, and there's something scary about her. There are a lot of Poe stories like this. "Ligeia" and "Morella" are two other stories that have a very similar theme and style.

---

Of course it seems unfair to judge a writer by their average story. You judge a writer by their best. But in Poe's case, the drop-off between the best and next-best is quite steep. Even his more-famous sensation tales, like "The Facts In The Curious Case Of M. Valdemar", are nowhere near as good as "The Tell-Tale Heart". You read and read through his collections, and you keep wanting to experience that moment of pure, incandescent horror—the feeling you got from "The Tell-Tale Heart"—and it doesn't really come. At best, there's a vague foreboding. But with the average tale, you're quite bored.

Another problem is that Poe is famous for many types of stories that he didn't necessarily do that well. It's interesting to read his detective stories, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter", but as a reading experience, they seem far inferior to the Sherlock Holmes stories, because the mysteries seem better-constructed in Holmes, the chains of deduction are more outlandish and shocking in Holmes, and Holmes and Watson are just more interesting characters.

It's similar with his tales of ratiocination, where a lot of the science seems outdated, so the solution wouldn't actually work in real life. And there's not a lot of character and the writing isn't that careful, so besides the chain of deduction there isn't a lot there. Of these stories I liked "The Pit and the Pendulum" and "Descent Into The Maelstrom" best because they at least contain striking central images (of the pit and the maelstrom) that give the story some more interest for the reader.

When it comes to Poe, I feel a bit lied-to, a bit deceived. I thought that because he was portrayed by John Cusack in a movie, and because there was a football team named after one of his poems, that somehow he was a great writer and people enjoyed reading his work. Now that I've looked more into him, I think...he was influential. He also seems to be very, very popular in France. But...in America I don't think there is that much love for the words that the man actually wrote.

I’m not saying nobody loves the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Some people definitely do. But…the amount of love is much lower than I’d expect for a writer with his reputation. I found out the hard way, by spending a week trying to read his work. Now you’re forewarned.

Maybe people love the poems. I don’t know. I am fond of the poems. In college I once spent several weeks trying to memorize “The Raven”. If the reputation is due more to the poems than to the fiction, please let me know.

Further Reading

The easiest way to tell if there’s a lack of interest in an author is to look at the audio editions of their work. If there’s anything odd or poorly-presented about the audiobooks, then it means nobody has taken the time to record their work recently in an accessible way. In Poe’s case, there’s one audiobook of his complete stories, but it’s marked as Volume One, and there’s no Volume Two available, even though it came out almost ten years ago. It also jumbles together poetry and stories in an absolutely bizarre way. There’s also an old recording of his selected tales, by Vincent Pryce, but it doesn’t give the story titles, just launches right into each story, and you have no idea which story it is.

I started off reading Poe’s complete stories, but I found it so wearying that I switched to a version of his selected writings. I’ve been favoring Norton recently, and their Selected Writings Of Edgar Allan Poe has almost all of the stories I mentioned above. It also has about fifteen more stories that I think aren’t particularly good, but you can decide whether to read them or not. Poe wrote one novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, that is strange mix of Gothic and adventure tale. There’s cannibalism and pirates and mutiny—all kinds of stuff—it felt like Poe was spinning his wheels, throwing a lot of things into a soup together, and it’s not surprising he never finished the story. I don’t recommend it.

1. Henry Begler had a great recent post on Salinger where he captures very accurately his reputation amongst classics-readers.

Slight Rebellion off Madison

2. Compare the tenor of replies to this note on Poe versus this note on Moby-Dick.

3. Poe also drank heavily, and he married his thirteen year old cousin, although there’s considerable debate about the extent to which he was either an alcoholic or a pedophile. He claims that his marriage to his cousin was never consummated, for instance—one claim is that he married her only because she was his last remaining family, and they were close, and he wanted to keep her nearby. I don’t know the truth, I’m just reporting what’s out there.

4. There is speculation that Poe supported slavery. The record here also seems to be quite thin. He may have supported it, but we can’t really know one way or another based on what he wrote, during his life, under his own name. The whole debate hinges on an unsigned review in one of his papers that was quite probably written by somebody else.