Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Poe (1809-1849), the American author who is famous for his Gothic tales of horror, madness and the dark interiors of the mind, such as The Fall of the House of Usher and The Tell-Tale Heart. As well as tapping at our deepest fears in poems such as The Raven, Poe pioneered detective fiction with his character C. Auguste Dupin in The Murders in the Rue Morgue. After his early death, a rival rushed out a biography to try to destroy Poe's reputation but he has only become more famous over the years as a cultural icon as well as an author.

With

Bridget Bennett
Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Leeds

Erin Forbes
Senior Lecturer in 19th-century African American and US Literature at the University of Bristol

And

Tom Wright
Reader in Rhetoric at the University of Sussex

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Peter Ackroyd, Poe: A Life Cut Short (Vintage, 2009)

Amy Branam Armiento and Travis Montgomery (eds.), Poe and Women: Recognition and Revision (Lehigh University Press, 2023)

Joan Dayan, Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe's Fiction (Oxford University Press, 1987)

Erin Forbes, ‘Edgar Allan Poe in the Great Dismal Swamp’ (Modern Philology, 2016)

Kevin J. Hayes (ed.), Edgar Allan Poe in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2012)

J. Gerald Kennedy and Scott Peeples (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe (Oxford University Press, 2018)

Jill Lepore, 'The Humbug: Poe and the Economy of Horror' (The New Yorker, April 20, 2009)

Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (Vintage, 1993)

Scott Peeples and Michelle Van Parys, The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City (Princeton University Press, 2020)

Edgar Allan Poe, The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (Penguin, 2006)

Shawn Rosenhelm and Stephen Rachman (eds.), The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995)