Edgar Allan Poe Talk led by Tim Helwig

Raised in the theater and orphaned as a child, Edgar Allen Poe was fostered by a wealthy Richmond, Virginia merchant who had admired the acting of the boy's mother. Poe attended the University of Virginia and then West Point where he rebelled against the academy’s restrictions.

He excelled in the literary arts, becoming a master of the macabre as well as the poet of the people. He became an unsurpassed teller of tales who created the detective genre, inspiring Arthur Conan Doyle to create Sherlock Holmes. As a literary critic his essays on art angered the established artistic world and inspired new generations of writers.

Timothy Helwig is Professor of English at Furman University in Greenville, where he teaches courses in nineteenth-century and working-class American literature. His book Cross-Racial Class Protest in Antebellum American Literature, which examines formal and thematic connections between sensational fiction and African American literature of the 1840s and 1850s, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2020.

His scholarly articles have appeared in American Studies, American Periodicals and Cambridge University Press’s A History of American Crime Fiction and Whiteness in American Literature and Culture. He has held visiting research fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society and the Library Company of Philadelphia, and he has been teaching Poe’s stories, poems and lone novel since he started graduate school in 1995.

Free admission. This event is a discussion, not an in-character performance.