And so, for my thirteenth birthday, I asked for and received a copy of Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. I have no idea whether Poe is an author appropriate for thirteen-year-old boys. But I still remember the deliciousness of the final bodily death of M. Valdemar, as he came out of his trance; I remember the thrill I took the first time I read “The Masque of the Red Death,” and Prospero’s doomed attempt to continue the party, and that final, perfect sentence; I remember the tingle of delighted horror that prickled the back of my neck when I encountered the first words of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” as the narrator assures us that he is not mad, and I knew that he was lying; I remember wondering—as I still wonder—what insult Fortunato gave to Montresor that demanded that damp journey through the catacombs, in search of a cask of amontillado . . . That was thirty years ago.

Even today I return, time and again, to Poe: an audiobook of Poe’s stories and poems read by Vincent Price and Basil Rathbone recently kept me company on a long drive from the Midwest to Florida. I found myself experiencing them in a way I never had before, treasuring the experience of driving through the darkness listening to the narratives of people suffering from morbid acutenesses of the senses, or the groaning of people “neither brute nor human, they are ghouls” and the throbbing of the bells they were tolling . . . “I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia,” said the velvet voice of the late Vincent Price, as I drove into Tennessee mountain country at midnight, and I worried immediately for the sanity of our narrator, obsessed by a dead wife who was almost his mother, and who would return in the shroud-wrapped corpse of his second wife and in so doing cause me to miss my highway turnoff . . .

Edgar Allan Poe wrote poems, stories, criticism, journalism. He was a working writer who kept himself alive with his words, for much of his life supporting, as best he could, his wife, who was his cousin Virginia (he married her when she was thirteen; she died aged twenty-five, having spent much of her time with him dying), and her mother, Muddy. He was vain, envious, good-hearted, morbid, troubled and a dreamer. He invented the form we now see as the detective story. He wrote tales of horror and of dread which even the critics admit were art. He had trouble with money and with drink for much of his life. He died in poverty and in hospital, in 1849, after a final week in which we have no knowledge of his movements—in all probability a lonely drunken week.

While he lived he was America’s finest writer, a poet and a craftsman whose work made him very little money, even as his poems, such as “The Raven,” were widely quoted, adored, parodied and reviled, while writers he envied, such as Longfellow, were far more successful, commercially. Still, Poe, for all his short life and unfulfilled potential, remains read today, his finest stories as successful, as readable, as contemporary as anyone could desire. Fashions in dead authors come and go, but Poe is, I would wager, beyond fashion.