Word: poe
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...magician uses sleights of hand to create his fiction; the writer uses sleights of mind. Edgar Allan Poe, whose stories and poems have put generations of readers into a gothic trance, took time out to satirize the tricks of the literary trade. His Eureka uses metaphysical doubletalk to "explain" philosophy. The patter creates credibility, leading Poe to conclude elsewhere that "pleased at comprehending, we often are so excited as to take it for granted that we assent." In "Diddling: Considered as One of the Exact Sciences," he offers the ingredients of a good con: "Minuteness, interest, perseverance, ingenuity, audacity, nonchalance...
...becomes apparent whence Tuchman's own inspiration comes. "Poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians, and sometimes they have given history a push," she writes in her opening piece. Throughout the collection, she turns again and again to poetry, quoting Emerson, Kipling, Longfellow, Tennyson and Poe. In the end she concludes, "What the poets did was to convey the feeling of an episode or a moment of history as they sensed it. The historian's task is rather to tell what happened within discussion of facts...
...Baltimore could become a valuable and joyous town. It is, after all, the home of the Orioles, the Ouija board, the softshell crab, the national anthem, the nation's first passenger railroad (the Baltimore & Ohio), Johns Hopkins Hospital and University, the Preakness, H.L. Mencken and Edgar Allan Poe (not to mention Spiro Agnew). It is also one of the last American possessors of a genuine honky-tonk district, known fondly as The Block, though even that lusty landmark has been sadly vulgarized by topless dancing and a renewal project that has largely plasticized its façade. Mencken once complained that...
...talked to your lover lately and whether you have five bucks to get a beer. On some days, sociobiology can go to hell, and you end up being a regular State Farm kind of guy. These are the days when you fantasize about being an artist (even Munch and Poe wanted to tell it to somebody) or dream about Mitterand, solidarity and the Spanish Civil War. Other days you end up tipping ten percent and thinking about law school in a fit of unmollified greed. These are the days when you're no sucker. Us against Them is really...
When Dashiell Hammett returned from World War I--almost completely disabled with tuberculosis--detective fiction was still a relatively new, and relatively genteel thing. The roots of the form don't go back very far in American literature. It was Poe whose "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," started the whol thing in 1841. This was the first of three stories Poe was to write which featured C. Auguste Dupin, an amateur investigator who solved crimes through an extraordinary talent for analytic thinking. The stories were not terribly popular in the United States; indeed, Poe himself was not very popular...