Still, Ackroyd gives only glancing attention to a number of intriguing matters. His gothic sensibility - a fascination with sickly women, premature interment and a mingling of beauty, love and death - arose from the early losses of his mother and adoptive mother. Poe was a Southern gentleman, for example, much devoted to the institution of slavery. As Ackroyd notes, he can be credited with inventing the modern horror story, the modern detective story, and, possibly, the modern sci-fi story.Īckroyd gives us a rounded portrait, including items that may have eluded our English teachers. Today, Poe remains a cultural touchstone, while most of his contemporaries and rivals are justly forgotten. He was also a prescient, if often vicious, literary critic. Yet he managed to write prodigiously, producing the short stories and poems for which he is chiefly remembered. Spending most of his adult life as a hack writer for one newspaper or magazine or another, Poe worked in Richmond, New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Baltimore, where he died in 1849 at age 40.
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