PBS’ ‘American Masters’ profiles Edgar Allan Poe
Free advice. Never have your obituary written by your rival and worst enemy. That’s the first lesson from the “American Masters” (9 p.m., PBS) profile “Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive.”
Apparently, nearly everything we think we know about Poe (1809-1849) is wrong. And that’s because the first obituary of the popular, if controversial, writer was penned by his onetime partner turned literary frenemy, Rufus W. Griswold. In Griswold’s words, Poe was reduced to a doomed, drug-addicted, gloomy caricature.
“Buried” reveals an ambitious, if embittered, figure who lost his mother at 2 and who had to make his way in the world as a writer at a time when there was no legal copyright protection and creators as prestigious as Charles Dickens had their work stolen and reprinted without permission or remuneration.
In spite of all that, Poe would work at several magazines and found several more. He made a name for himself as a brutally honest critic, wielding a savage pen that did not win him many friends in the small circles of 19th-century publishing. Poe would die at 40, yet crammed a brief botched military career into his resume, one that would take him to West Point, where he floundered and flunked out.
Poe saw himself as a poet foremost. “The Raven” remains memorized and popular to this day and won him so much contemporary fame that strangers would flap their “wings” when they saw him on the streets.
With his short tale “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Poe essentially invented the detective story. He also created elements (including C. Auguste Dupin, the brilliant deductionist, the astonished friend/sidekick/narrator, numerous red herrings and a final “reveal”) that have been copied down the decades, from Sherlock Holmes to Poirot to “House” and any number of TV sleuths.
As one literary expert observes, it was therefore fitting that Poe should disappear for days and suddenly die in a manner right out of a lurid mystery novel.
Narrated by Kathleen Turner, “Buried” features re-enactments starring Denis O’Hare (“This Is Us”) and readings of Poe’s work by Chris Sarandon and Ben Schnetzer.
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