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  • Introduction
  • Leland S. Person

In contrast to the many lonely, claustrophobic settings of his fiction—basements, bedrooms, coffins, dungeons—Poe spent much of his life in cities: Boston, Richmond, London, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York. Although Poe visited New York several times, he didn’t live there for an extended period until April 1844, when he and Virginia moved from Philadelphia. Although the Poes settled temporarily, as Scott Peeples notes in this special feature, at a boarding house on Greenwich Street in lower Manhattan, within two months “the family moved to a farm owned by Patrick and Mary Brennan, a 216-acre parcel off Bloomingdale Road—now Broadway—near Amsterdam Avenue and Eighty-fourth Street” (5). Poe had been especially productive, at least as a fiction writer, during his Philadelphia residence, publishing many of his best tales (“Ligeia,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “William Wilson,” “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Black Cat”). But he was even more productive in New York, publishing many new stories (if not many we now consider among his best), as well as numerous reviews and other essays in such periodicals as the Evening Mirror and the Broadway Journal. For example, in a remarkable series of sketches, The Literati of New York City, which Godey’s Lady’s Book published in six installments (May–October 1846), Poe offered a comprehensive description and assessment of the New York literary landscape. Under the subtitle “Some Honest Opinions at Random Respecting Their Authorial Merits, with Occasional Words of Personality,” he wrote what Kenneth Silverman calls “praise-blame” essays that nearly always include descriptions of the writer’s physical appearance.1 Overall, Poe surveys thirty-eight American writers, thirteen of whom are women (including Margaret Fuller, Caroline Kirkland, Lydia Maria Child, and Catharine Maria Sedgwick). Male writers include Nathaniel P. Willis, Evert Duyckinck, Fitz-Greene Halleck, Christopher Pearse Cranch, and Charles Fenno Hoffman.

Poe’s New York years, 1844–1847, seem notable more for these essays and his editorial work than for his fiction or poetry writing—exceptions being “The Raven,” which he probably wrote or at least completed at Brennan Farm, and “The Philosophy of Composition.” Arguably the best tale from this late period, “The Cask of Amontillado,” as several scholars have observed, reflects Poe’s literary battles with New York writers and editors, including the libel [End Page 2] suit he filed (and eventually won) against Hiram Fuller and Augustus Clason, owners of the New-York Mirror. As Silverman suggests, in Montresor, “Poe now figured the writer not as a ghost but an avenger, and storytelling as a means of getting even with the world.” In addition to Fuller and Clason, the tale “brings to mind” Thomas Dunn English, Charles F. Briggs, Lewis Gaylord Clark, and “the host of other enemies he had attracted.”2

The New York years saw Poe increasingly embattled with the literary establishment and with many other writers. Virginia’s severe health problems, which led to her death on 30 January 1847, surely contributed to his unstable mental and emotional states. In a series of review essays, he accused Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of plagiarism—to such an extent that his biographers commonly refer to this as the “Longfellow War.” As Silverman notes, he also began to drink more and more regularly, sabotaging his working relationship with several literary organizations and magazines, including the Broadway Journal.3

The essays in the following cluster had their origin at the 2014 Poe Studies Association meeting in New York City. As already noted, Scott Peeples summarizes the earliest segment of Poe’s residency in and around New York City by focusing on the time he spent at Brennan Farm, located on the Hudson River about five miles north of what was then the city center. In letters, Peeples observes, Poe repeatedly “call[ed] attention to his seclusion” (9), and he capitalized on his physical distance in order to separate himself from New York writers. In a nice turn of phrase, for example, Peeples argues that “the character Poe created” for the Marginalia series he wrote for the United States Magazine and Democratic Review might be called “Marginal Man.” Peeples notes the...

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