Verbal Violence and Patterns of Words: Poe, Bowles, and an Alternative American Tradition

In 1950, Paul Bowles published the influential volume of short stories The Delicate Prey, which he dedicated, obliquely, to Poe. This article considers the hitherto neglected relationship between Bowles and Poe, and the ways in which Bowles’s short stories adapted formal and stylistic aspects from his imagined literary ancestor. It also examines the cultural conditions that influenced Bowles’s invocation of Poe and, by analyzing the critical reception of Bowles’s anthology, suggests some of the reasons that Poe himself was out of place in mid-twentieth-century America.