23/03/2023
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Jeffrey Keeten rated a book it was amazing
8 days ago

A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan...
by Mark Dawidziak
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Read in March 2023
”’Poe really anticipated the feel of our own time, even more than Twain did,’ he said. ‘Poe is alive to our culture today and to readers today in ways that he wasn’t alive to readers in his lifetime. Poe was so far ahead of his own time in terms of intuiting changes that were already happening in the culture. And a lot of that has to do with atrocities of the twentieth century: the Holocaust, the terrible wars, the inventions of mass destruction. We are now properly in a place where Poe resonates. A reader in the 2020s instantly understands “The Masque of the Red Death” and gets the sense of entrapment and fatality and the claustrophobic effect that Poe creates.’”----J. Gerald Kennedy
Edgar Allan Poe died October 7th, 1849, and Robert Louis Stevenson was born November 13th, 1850. Talk about two ships passing in the night, ghost ships with tattered sails, dangling anchor chains, and battered hulls. If one believes in mystical things, there was a passing of the torch when one was buried and the other born. I have a cosmic connection with both writers. I share a birthday with Poe, and my father shares a birthday with Stevenson. The book that made me a lifetime reader was Treasure Island, and reading Stevenson led me to Poe. I have lived with numerous misconceptions about both writers for most of my life, but over the decades, researchers have sifted through the legends of these men, and despite the mounds of fragmented and misleading “evidence,” scholars are beginning to unravel some of the truth from the misconceptions.
Poe was buried quickly, too quick for his closest friends and family to attend his funeral. Poe’s remains reside in Baltimore. Stevenson is buried on the island of Samoa. Both are entombed beneath monuments, and ac... More at:
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