EDGAR ALLEN POE'S LAST STORY

Professor Thomas Ollive Mabbott (1898-1968) is widely recognized as the foremost scholar of Edgar Allen Poe's works during his lifetime and beyond.

This is from the back cover flap from his collection of Poe's verse, "Volume I: Poems", first published in 1969:

For more than a generation Thomas Ollive Mabbott has been known as the outstanding Poe scholar in America. Nearly every serious book on Poe published since the later 1920's carries somewhere an acknowledgement of his help, and shortly before his death on May 15, 1968, the Poe Newsletter referred to him as “the only total Poe scholar” among us. The vast accumulation of material, textual information, and critical notes that he gathered is of immeasurable value to the study of Poe.

Publishing a comprehensive scholarly edition of the works of Poe was the dream of Mr. Mabbott's youth and the unremitting labor of his life. At the time of his death, the first volume, Poems, was all but finished: he had corrected more than half of the galleys and had approved the printer's copy for the text of the poems and for the accompanying apparatus. He had also almost completed the Tales and Sketches and accumulated an immense amount of material for subsequent volumes planned for the set.

Mr. Mabbott was born in New York City July 6, 1898 and received his A.B. in 1920 and Ph.D. in 1923 from Columbia University. Besides being an authority on Poe he also engaged in serious numismatic research and over the years built a rare and extremely valuable coin collection, emphasizing the coins of the early Roman Empire. In addition, he gathered an excellent collection of fifteenth-century block prints. Throughout his life, Mr. Mabbott was a teacher. After brief periods at Columbia, Northwestern, and Brown University, he joined the faculty of Hunter College in 1929 and remained there until his retirement in 1966. During his last two years he was Visiting Professor at St. John's University.

According to Poe's biographer, Kenneth Silverman, the as yet untitled story (novel?) was believed to have been started between May and August, 1849, and is likely his last work of fiction. The manuscript was left unfinished and it wouldn't see print until over a century later when Professor Mabbott invited author Robert Bloch to complete the story.

This is a transcript of the original unfinished MS:

Jan. 3. A dead calm all day. Towards evening, the sea looked very much like glass. A few sea-weeds came in sight; but besides them absolutely nothing all day — not even the slightest speck of cloud. ……. Occupied myself in exploring the light-house …. It is a very lofty one — as I find to my cost when I have to ascend its interminable stairs — not quite 160 feet, I should say, from the low-water mark to the top of the lantern. From the bottom inside the shaft, however, the distance to the summit is 180 feet at least: — thus the floor is 20 feet below the surface of the sea, even at low-tide …… It seems to me that the hollow interior at the bottom should have been filled in with solid masonry. Undoubtedly the whole would have been thus rendered more safe: — but what am I thinking about? A structure such as this is safe enough under any circumstances. I should feel myself secure in it during the fiercest hurricane that ever raged — and yet I have heard seamen say occasionally, with a wind at South-West, the sea has been known to run higher here than any where with the single exception of the Western opening of the Straits of Magellan. No mere sea, though, could accomplish anything with this solid iron-riveted wall — which, at 50 feet from high-water mark, is four feet thick, if one inch …….. The basis on which the structure rests seems to me to be chalk ……

Jan 4.

[Manuscript ends here.]

In what was certainly a momentous event, it was first published in the January-February 1953 issue of Ziff-Davis' FANTASTIC digest pulp magazine under the title, "The Lighthouse".

FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND #53 (January 1969) reprinted the story as, "The Horror in the Lighthouse". In the usual style of the magazine, editor Forrest J Ackerman illustrated the story with photos from various horror films.