A Backward Glance over Some Leading Citizens in the Poe World

Having grown up, academically speaking, in the shadow of Arthur Hobson Quinn, who lived roughly half an hour from my college, Ursinus, and with so many of my college teachers having studied their American literature at the University of Pennsylvania, where Quinn was supreme when American literature was still a fairly new subject in university instruction, and now with myself looking like I might well be a contemporary of Quinn, or even Poe and John Greenleaf Whittier, and being from a family in which genealogy was important, it may be natural that I should represent historical memory and share my recollections of some persons who pioneered in and opened up Poe studies.

Some may be surprised to learn that Professor Quinn was, first and foremost, not a Poe specialist, but that his preeminent scholarly love was American drama. For pre-twentieth-century American plays, Quinn’s studies typically remain, after nearly a century, almost the only informed commentaries. Many have become increasingly aware that William Dunlap, America’s first major playwright, and the novelist Charles Brockden Brown, might each properly be deemed the Adam to American literary Gothicism.

To return to Professor Quinn: when I began my own academic studies, he was in his eighties, ill, and housebound. He spent most of his time nestled in a chair, swathed in blankets and quilts, and wearing a sun shade, claiming that reading so many early American plays had ruined his eyesight. Before such ills befell him, Quinn was active in having established the Clothier Collection of American Drama at the University of Pennsylvania, which remains one of the foremost collections of early American plays. The Poe interest emerged from Quinn’s own work in American drama—Poe’s parents being actors—and from his aim to furnish an accurate biographical portraiture of Poe which would demolish the long-standing depiction by Rufus Griswold.

Spending more than twenty years in preparing that biography, which appeared first in 1941 but has stood the test of time well enough to go through several reprintings, Quinn achieved a solid narrative account, though many of his critical opinions have been modified or superseded in the work of others. A Quinn student, J. Albert Robbins, followed his mentor’s practices in determining to present factually accurate scholarship, as some early volumes in the American Literary Scholarship journal attest. Robbins often recounted to me anecdotes of his days as Quinn’s student. Those who know Quinn primarily for the Poe biography and the edition of his poems, fiction, and selected criticism (done in collaboration with E. H. O’Neill) may be unaware that Quinn edited a selective book of Emerson’s essays (1920; lately reprinted by several paperback publishers); that he early on championed the status of Edith Wharton, with a small introductory overview published in 1938, just a year after her death; and that in 1950 he published a collection, An Edith Wharton Treasury. These publications were altogether appropriate, coming from one who pioneered in the study of American literature. Just so, another Quinn book, The Soul of America Yesterday and Today (1932), was an early work in fields since called American Civilization or American Studies. His American Fiction: An Historical and Critical Survey (1936) covered an immense amount of material, at a time when such coverage had not been offered, though shifts in the canon now make this indeed an old-fashioned book—for example, in an entire chapter devoted to F. Marion Crawford, while only several pages are allowed for Melville.

I went to graduate school at Duke University, chiefly to study Hawthorne with Arlin Turner. Arlin directed my M.A. thesis on Hawthorne, and he started me out on my dissertation on Poe’s Gothicism. Arlin later told me that he switched from an original intent to prep for a business career to one in teaching American literature, thanks to an inspiring professor then at West Texas State College. Arlin went on to do Ph.D. work with Killis Campbell at the University of Texas. Turner told me, when my first article on Poe was in...