“Edgar Allan Poe: Terror of the Soul” is a new exhibit opening Friday at New York’s Morgan Library & Museum. Drawn from holdings of the Morgan, the New York Public Library’s Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, and Susan Jaffe Tane, described as “the world’s foremost private Poe collector, the exhibit brings together an amazing collection of Poe materials including manuscripts, letters, first editions, Poe daguerreotypes, and “even a fragment of Poe’s original coffin.” There are some treasures as well – “three copies of Poe’s first book, “Tamerlane and Other Poems, which is among the rarest books in American literature (only 50 copies were printed, and just 12 remain), and one of only three existing pages of “The Lighthouse,” a story left unfinished at Poe’s death.” Besides all the Poe artifacts, the show also highlights his influence on other writers such as Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw, Vladimir Nabokov and Stephen King. Read more about the collection in this NYT article. And check the EPL catalog for works by and about this writer.
Laura
