I had hoped to write again about Edgar Allan Poe in the anniversary month of his death, but I fell through the cracks of the world and only on Halloween night did I come back up again. Things changed a little in that five weeks and a day. I'll write about a couple of them, but first I'll write about the more distant past.
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Nearly two years ago, at Thanksgiving time in 2023, I wrote about Edgar Allan Poe and Abraham Lincoln. I repeated the observation that one of our greatest presidents and one of our greatest writers were born within twenty-four days of each other in 1809. In that they were contemporaries, I wondered then whether Honest Abe ever read Poe. And then I found an answer, and the answer is yes.
I found the answer in a book called Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story by Howard Haycraft (1905-1991). I have the "newly enlarged edition" published by Biblo and Tannen in 1974. The original edition was published in 1941. A scholar and historian of the crime and detective genres, Haycraft found his own answer for the question of Did Abraham Lincoln read the works of Edgar Allan Poe? in the work of an earlier author, William Dean Howells (1837-1920), whom I think of as a late 19th-century author but who was old enough to have written about Abraham Lincoln while he was campaigning for president in 1860.
In his book, Haycraft referred to Howells' "little known 'campaign biography'" as the source of his information on Lincoln and Poe. That book is, by name, Lives and Speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin, co-authored with John L. Hayes (who wrote the biography of Hannibal Hamlin) and published in New York and Columbus, Ohio, in 1860. Howells' portion of the book was later reprinted as Life of Abraham Lincoln, including in a facsimile edition of the original, corrected by hand by Lincoln himself and published in 1938 and again in 1960.
Here is what Howells had to say about Abraham Lincoln on the subject of Edgar Allan Poe:
The bent of his mind is mathematical and metaphysical, and he is therefore pleased with the absolute and logical method of Poe's tales and sketches, in which the problem of mystery is given, and wrought out into everyday facts by processes of cunning analysis. It is said that he suffers no year to pass without a perusal of this author. (1960, pp. 31-32)
And I think: what a wonderful development it is that Abraham Lincoln read Edgar Allan Poe!
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Howells is supposed to have had a not very high opinion of Poe, but I don't have any illustrative quotes. He seems to have shared that opinion with other prominent writers and critics. Popular culture is democratic, and so we should be careful anytime we find ourselves following the masses or the mob lest we also find our minds deadened, or worse than that, blood on our hands. But almost nobody reads Howells anymore and everyone reads Poe. We have made our judgment and our choice.
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In looking for quotes by Howells on Poe, I found this quote instead:
Yet every now and then I read a book with perfect comfort and much exhilaration, whose scenes the average Englishman would gasp in. Nothing happens; that is, nobody murders or debauches anybody else; there is no arson or pillage of any sort; there is not a ghost, or a ravening beast, or a hair-breadth escape, or a shipwreck, or a monster of self-sacrifice, or a lady five thousand years old in the whole course of the story; "no promenade, no band of music, nossing!" as Mr. Du Maurier's Frenchman said of the meet for a fox-hunt. Yet it is all alive with the keenest interest for those who enjoy the study of individual traits and general conditions as they make themselves known to American experience.
These words are supposed to have come from an essay in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 73 (1886), but I haven't found them in an online search. If they are indeed Howells' own, then he (as a realist) set himself up in opposition to the mainstream of American literature, that is if Leslie Fiedler was correct in positing in his Love and Death in the American Novel that "the American novel is pre-eminently a novel of terror," (Delta/Dell, 1966, p. 26) and that "our classic literature is a literature of horror for boys." (p. 29) Howells' brief summary of popular fiction, though, pretty well describes genre fiction, including the contents of Weird Tales.
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I understand what Howells meant. It's good and I think necessary to read fiction in which "nothing happens," not in the Seinfeld sense of nothing happens but in the sense of nothing happens that is terrible or shocking or degrading to the author, his or her characters, or the reader. Readers of today, however, especially in genre fiction, seem to love and revel in violence, gore, destruction, nihilism, and so on. Stop and read instead something like a novel by Anne Tyler, or a story like "Kari Aasen in Heaven" by Johan Bojer (1904; 1927), which is a fantasy to be sure but a nice one.
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William Dean Howells was born in Martinsville, Ohio, now known as Martins Ferry. Like Johnny Appleseed, a fellow Ohioan, his family were Swedenborgians. Like Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?), also a fellow Ohioan, he worked in his youth as a printer's devil.
During this past very hot summer in the Midwest, I read from The Ohio Guide, compiled by writers of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and published in 1940, a book I had found at a secondhand store just a few days before. I was staying at a place along a road mentioned in that book, a road now called Cave Road, near Bainbridge, Ohio. It's a strange, fascinating, and mysterious world we live in when one can be carried away by a book, eighty-five years into the past, there to catch a glimpse of the very place in which one now finds himself. I have compared books to sailing ships, but here it seems apt to compare a book to an automobile, with the author as the driver and tour guide, and the reader as the backseat passenger, with eyes wide open and set upon the horizon. Every mile of road is a page in the book. We may turn its pages by traveling the miles.
Howells is in The Ohio Guide. There is mere mention therein of a figure from Ohio folklore of whom I had never heard and about whom Howells wrote in a book I soon found out was entitled The Leatherwood God (1916). As it turns out, the man called the Leatherwood God was not folkloric at all but--like Johnny Appleseed--a real person. His name was John C. Dylkes, and his career as a well-known figure in the Ohio country began in August 1828 in or near Salesville, situated along Leatherwood Creek in Guernsey County. Dylkes claimed to be a celestial being. I imagine him as another in a long line of Americans who fancied themselves important religious and theological figures. Like Ambrose Bierce, Dylkes disappeared without a trace.
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By the way, Edgar Allan Poe's initials--EAP--are an anagram of the word ape, a kind of which is the perpetrator of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." According to Howard Haycraft and many others, that story was the first detective story.
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Finally, I met this past month a retired schoolteacher who was also from Martins Ferry, and I have a friend who is descended from the original settlers of Guernsey County, those who came from the Isle of Guernsey in the early 1800s and who gave that county its name. I will just say that the story of our America is fascinating beyond words and with God's grace will go on and on.
Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley
