Note sull'episodio
In October 1849, a delirious man wearing someone else's clothes was found on the streets of Baltimore, calling out for a mysterious Reynolds before dying days later. That man was Edgar Allan Poe, and this episode argues that the brooding drunken madman of popular memory is a distortion. Orphaned by age three and raised but never adopted by Richmond merchant John Allan, Poe gambled his way out of the University of Virginia, then enlisted in the Army under the name Edgar A. Perry and rose to Sergeant Major before deliberately getting himself court-martialed out of West Point.
We look at how the absence of international copyright law boxed American authors out of their own market, pushing Poe into magazine editing and ruthless criticism as the so-called Tomahawk Man. Along the way he invented the detective story with C. Auguste Dupin, turned code breaking into a national spectator sport, wrote The Gold Bug, and in Eureka intuited an expanding universe decades before modern cosmology. The episode closes with the theories around his death, including cooping, and the character assassination by rival Rufus Griswold that backfired into global fame.
- Why John Allan's refusal to fund Poe's education drove him into debt, the Army and eventual disownment
- How pirated British bestsellers made it nearly impossible to earn a living as an American writer
- How Poe used frequency analysis to crack readers' ciphers and boosted magazine circulation with literary feuds
- Why The Raven made him famous nationwide but paid him only nine dollars
- How Griswold's forged letters and defamatory memoir shaped the Poe myth that Baudelaire fell in love with