This year marks the two-hundredth anniversary of Poe’s birth and the publication of two collections of gothic tales produced by the Mystery Writers of America: “On Raven’s Wing: New Tales in Honor of Edgar Allan Poe” and “In the Shadow of the Master: Classic Tales by Edgar Allan Poe”. They pair Poe’s best-known stories with modern commentaries; Stephen King muses on “The Genius of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart.’
This New Yorker article gives some background on the short impoverished life of the great tale-teller, and describes the period (at the end of the 1830’s) when he was most prolific as a time of: “banking collapse, financial panic, and grinding depression that had a particularly devastating effect on the publishing industry”…deja vue …all over again?
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