Popular Poe
Over the course of the twentieth century, new editions, illustrations, and adaptations made Poe’s work more and more accessible. But these new versions tended to emphasize certain features of his writing: the unsettling psychology of some of his tales, the melancholy mood of his poetry, the dark atmospheres and weird settings he was so skilled at designing. Readers grew interested not just in Poe’s creations, but in Poe himself as a kind of fictional character—an American man of sorrows.
Today, Poe’s ever-present portrait adorns all kinds of familiar objects, from postage stamps to coasters. He has become a stand-in for the macabre, for an eerie feeling we keep on recreating, sometimes seriously, sometimes with a comic edge. This mythical Poe may blind us to the realities of the historical Poe. But the character we have fashioned is, after all, an index of our love, and of Poe’s own enigmatic powers—a writer of inventions, attempting to invent a livelihood out of words.