A Note on "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" by Edgar Allan Poe

Though we think of Edgar Allan Poe as the master of the detective story, the Gothic romance and horror story, the psychological thriller, the science fiction and fantasy short story, haunting lyrical poetry, and ground-breaking analytical criticism, it is interesting to consider him also as a regional writer. Poe is arguably the most popular and most influential American writer on world literature and culture, but his identity as a Southerner was never forgotten by him. Born in Boston to itinerant actors on January 19, 1809, the same year as Abe Lincoln and Alfred Tennyson, Poe grew up in Richmond as a foster child in the Allan family. He always described himself as a Virginian, and planned to return to that city on the James to live just before his mysterious death in Baltimore in October of 1849.

Many of Poe's stories have an English or European setting and flavor. His great landscape tale The Domain of Arnheim is set in some imagined country, a paradise on earth of architecture and gardening design. But Poe's story A Tale of the Ragged Mountains may be the first work of classic short fiction set in the Southern Appalachian Mountains where Poe had once been a student at the University of Virginia. It is appropriate that he set this story of mystery, hypnosis, and transmigration of souls in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, in a world of dark coves and ancient, majestic forests. Poe's story is a phantasmagoria of enigmas and splendors, as he gives a realistic treatment to what is apparently supernatural.

In American literature of the nineteenth century, Poe is the distinct outsider, a Southerner, an orphan of Irish-America descent, with a reputation for drunkenness, among New England Brahmins and New York aristocrats. In every way he failed to fit into the literary world of his time, except for the popularity of his stories and poems. From then until the present day, he has held an uneasy place in the American literary canon, more respected by foreign critics than native ones. Much of his work is peculiarly modern and is known by heart by millions around the globe, cherished specially by the French and the South American Magic Realists. And oddly enough, in this one tale, he belongs to the Appalachian canon, and I, for one, am proud to claim him as one of us.