A History of American Literature

Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 107

imitates. It is as if Poe, with typical perversity, had decided to rewrite the dangers

that many of his contemporaries saw in the American ethic of selfhood, and the way

it opened up the perilous possibility, in particular, of isolation. For, in his work, sol-

ipsism becomes the aim: the poet seeks neither to embrace nor to dominate the

world but absolute solitude, the sanctuary of the disengaged soul.

Disengagement was not, however, something that Poe could pursue as a practical

measure. He had to earn his living, to support himself and then later his wife: in

1836 he married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia. He worked as an editor for various

journals, including Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and Graham’s Magazine; he was

associated with other journals, such as the New-York Mirror and Godey’s Lady’s Book;

in 1845 he even became proprietor of the Broadway Journal; and he was an apparently

indefatigable essayist and reviewer. What the magazines wanted, in particular, was

stories; and in 1835 Poe attracted attention with one of his first short stories,

“MS Found in a Bottle,” which won first prize in a contest judged by John Pendleton

Kennedy (1795–1870) – himself a writer and author of one of the first idyllic fictional

accounts of life on the old plantation, Swallow Barn; or, A Sojourn in the Old

Dominion (1832). This short story was followed by more and more tales appealing

to the contemporary taste for violent humor and macabre incident. “Murders in the

Rue Morgue,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and “The Imp of the Perverse” were

all published in Graham’s Magazine in 1841–1842, while 1843 saw the freelance

publication of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,”

and another prize-winning story, “The Gold Bug.” His first collection of stories,

Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, was published in 1840; it included “Ligeia,”

“Berenice,” and “The Assignation.” In 1845 Tales appeared, a book that reprinted

previous work selected by Evert Duyckinck (1816–1878) – an influential man of

letters of the time who, with his brother George (1823–1863), was to produce a

Cyclopaedia of American Literature (1855), the most comprehensive scholarly work

of its kind at the time. This later collection contained “The Pit and the Pendulum”

and “ ‘The Tell-Tale Heart” among other notable pieces. In the earlier, in turn, Poe

made his attentions as a short story writer clear in a brief preface. It was true, Poe

admitted, that many of his stories were Gothic because they had terror as their

“thesis.” But that terror, he went on, was not of the conventional kind, since it had

little to do with the usual Gothic paraphernalia; it was, instead, a terror “of the soul.”

Whatever else he might have been, Poe was an unusually perceptive (if often also

malicious) critic. And he was especially perceptive about his own work. Poe did not

invent the Gothic tale, any more than he invented the detective story, science fiction,

or absurd humor. To each of these genres or approaches, however, he did – as he

realized and, in some instances, boasted – make his own vital contribution. In a

detective story like “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” for example, Poe created the

detective story as a tale of ratiocination, a mystery that is gradually unraveled and

solved. He also created the character of the brilliant amateur who solves a crime that

seems beyond the talents of the professionals. And in his Gothic stories, he first

destabilizes the reader by using unreliable narrators: madmen and liars, initially

rational men who have their rationalism thoroughly subverted, men who should by

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