Edgar Allan Poe Is America's Most Influential Writer — So Why Does America Ignore Him?
Edgar Allan Poe, Quintessential American Writer
Laura Miller reviews Emily Ogden's Darkness Becomes Bright, a slim essay collection arguing that Poe, rarely named among quintessential American writers, may be the most influential of them all. Ogden traces his global reach through Baudelaire, Marie Bonaparte, and Julio Cortázar, and credits him with inventing the detective story. Poe's claustrophobic, fatalistic tales, Miller suggests, are the shadow cast by the American Dream.
The mysterious alchemy of Poe's writing, and of Baudelaire's, too, and Cortázar's, and of the work of many writers and artists in this cosmic cloud—is that here, horror yields beauty.