HAPPY 210th BIRTHDAY, EDGAR ALLAN POE!

"Poe brought horror down to earth and made us fear the ordinary and everyday" - Michael Capuzzo, The Smithsonian

So, who do you think is America's most influential writer: Hemingway? Twain? Melville? Think again. . . it's Edgar Allan Poe! It was Poe, after all, that introduced us to the detective story as we know it today. His 1841 tale, "The Murders In the Rue Morgue" initiates many of the tropes that persist in modern in crime fiction -- the eccentric A. Auguste Dupin (think Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and our favorite Weird Tales detective, Jules de Grandin) and the incompetent police (ex. Inspector Lestrade). The creator of the immortal Sherlock Holmes himself, Arthur Conan Doyle, declared Poe "father of the detective tale."

This short article from the January/February 2019 issue of SMITHSONIAN describes Poe's enduring legacy on the occasion of his 210th birthday!