Celebrating Edgar Allan Poe’s 200th Birthday

Edgar Allan Poe is among the most treasured of American writers, and his homes and haunts are celebrated as tourist attractions in many of the cities where he lived. He was an American Romantic, a journalist and a writer in the populist genres, the inventor of the modern detective story, and a poet whose melodic narrative ballads remain perennial favorites 150 years after his death. When we played Survivor Poet in 2001, Poe made it to the final twosome and was the very last poet voted off the island before Emily Dickinson was declared the winner by our readers.

The 200th anniversary of his birth is approaching — it’s January 16, 2009 — and celebrations and conferences and performances for the bicentennial are happening all over the place. Here’s a sampling:

• The Poe Bicentennial Celebration at the Poe House Museum in Baltimore
• Bicentennial events at the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site, the house he lived in in Philadelphia
• Nevermore 2009, the City of Baltimore’s year-long celebration
• Boston College’s 2-day bicentennial celebration in the city of his birth (where Boston College Poe scholars are lobbying for greater recognition of Poe — see “The pendulum swings: Boston urged to reclaim Poe” by Peter Schworm in The Boston Globe)
• Poe Revealed 1809 - 2009, commemorative events in historic sites all over Virginia
• Third International Edgar Allan Poe Conference: The Bicentennial sponsored by Penn State in Philadelphia in October 2009
• A new Edgar Allan Poe postage stamp to be released on his birthday, January 16

More on Edgar Allan Poe:
Our biographical profile of E.A. Poe, American Romantic
Library: Poems by E.A. Poe
A new wrinkle in the mystery of Edgar Allan Poe’s Death
The Mysterious Poe Toaster Revealed?
Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe! The Empty House Tour, by Tom Devaney
A new Poe(try) film: The Death of Poe (2006)