On his book The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City
Cover Interview of May 12, 2021
A close-up
The book is illustrated with original photographs of “Poe
places” by Michelle Van Parys; it also contains a number of archival images,
including contemporary maps of the cities where Poe lived. I would hope that a
browsing reader would first just flip through the book and look at some of those
photographs, which are an important feature of the project, along with the maps
and other archival items. A few of Michelle’s photographs are “blended” with
archival images to create a sort of then-and-now effect, which I really like.
Archival photograph of the building that housed the Southern Literary Messenger, Poe’s workplace in Richmond from 1835 to
early 1837, blended with a contemporary photograph of the same corner by
Michelle Van Parys. Archival photograph courtesy of the Valentine, Richmond,
VA.
But in terms of the text, I think the beginning of Chapter
Three, which covers Poe’s years in Philadelphia, is a good sample of what the
book is like. The first pages are about life in Philadelphia in the years after
the Panic of 1837, with some quotations from contemporary observers like Charles
Dickens. I also discuss Poe’s motivation for moving there, and where he settled
together with Virginia and Maria Clemm. They found a house near Rittenhouse
Square, a part of town that was only sparsely developed at the time. And of
course, that’s why Poe could afford to live in that area—it hadn’t become
fashionable yet.
This part of the chapter moves along quickly, as Poe lands a
job at Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, and I’m then able to describe some
of the people he got to know in connection with that job as well as the
significance of magazines in American life in the mid-nineteenth century. About
ten pages into the chapter, I discuss some of the satires Poe wrote in the late
1830s: “How to Write a Blackwood Article”, “Peter Pendulum, the Business-Man”, and
“The Man That Was Used Up”; some lesser-known stories that I think reflect his
skepticism toward the world of business and politics that he was becoming
acquainted with in Philadelphia.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
A close-up
The book is illustrated with original photographs of “Poe places” by Michelle Van Parys; it also contains a number of archival images, including contemporary maps of the cities where Poe lived. I would hope that a browsing reader would first just flip through the book and look at some of those photographs, which are an important feature of the project, along with the maps and other archival items. A few of Michelle’s photographs are “blended” with archival images to create a sort of then-and-now effect, which I really like.
But in terms of the text, I think the beginning of Chapter Three, which covers Poe’s years in Philadelphia, is a good sample of what the book is like. The first pages are about life in Philadelphia in the years after the Panic of 1837, with some quotations from contemporary observers like Charles Dickens. I also discuss Poe’s motivation for moving there, and where he settled together with Virginia and Maria Clemm. They found a house near Rittenhouse Square, a part of town that was only sparsely developed at the time. And of course, that’s why Poe could afford to live in that area—it hadn’t become fashionable yet.
This part of the chapter moves along quickly, as Poe lands a job at Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, and I’m then able to describe some of the people he got to know in connection with that job as well as the significance of magazines in American life in the mid-nineteenth century. About ten pages into the chapter, I discuss some of the satires Poe wrote in the late 1830s: “How to Write a Blackwood Article”, “Peter Pendulum, the Business-Man”, and “The Man That Was Used Up”; some lesser-known stories that I think reflect his skepticism toward the world of business and politics that he was becoming acquainted with in Philadelphia.