Poe-Land: The Hallowed Haunts of Edgar Allan Poe

Of course, he never got any revenue from raven-adorned T-shirts or plush black cats. He lived a life of poverty and relative obscurity, the value of his work to a burgeoning world of American literature, and to human letters in general, going mostly unacknowledged during his lifetime. And while that’s not too strange in the literary world, where many live and work without acclaim and yet still secure a legacy of fame posthumously, Poe’s pendulum swings wider and stranger than most in this regard. The position he and his work hold today and the position they held in his lifetime are so out of proportion as to give credence to the idea of cosmic jokes.