(Photo by Yours Truly. Poe by Dellamorteco.) 

On this day in 1849 – 171 years ago – Edgar Allan Poe died at the age of forty under mysterious circumstances.

For more information, read “Mysterious for Evermore” by Matthew Pearl, an article on Poe’s death from The Telegraph. Pearl is the author of a fascinating novel about the subject, The Poe Shadow.

(Photo by Yours Truly.)

The following are some of my favorite links about Edgar Allan Poe:

• PoeStories.com: An Exploration of Short Stories by Edgar Allan Poe
• Poe-Land: The Hallowed Haunts of Edgar Allan Poe (I highly recommend this book by J.W. Ocker, and I suggest that you enter “Poe” into the Search feature at his Odd Things I’ve Seen site, as well, for many Poe-riffic posts!)
• The Poe Museum of Richmond
• The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore
• Hocus Pocus Comics is Poe-centric to the max, and I invite you to visit the site! In addition, check out this beautiful time-lapse video of David Hartman drawing an exclusive Kickstarter cover for The Imaginary Voyages of Edgar Allan Poe – and subscribe to the Hocus Pocus Comics YouTube channel while you’re at it!  
• The Caedmon recordings – that’s 5 hours of Edgar Allan Poe stories read by Vincent Price & Basil Rathbone – are now available on Spotify (download the software here). (Thanks, Jessica!)

And now, here is one of my favorite readings of Poe:

Gabriel Byrne’s narration of the pandemic-relevant and all-too-timely “The Masque of the Red Death.”

The red death had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal – the madness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress, and termination of the disease, were incidents of half an hour.

But Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his crenellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince’s own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts.

They resolved to leave means neither of ingress nor egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the “Red Death.”

– from “The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe (1842). Read the complete story here. 

View the full article