Abstract
Edgar Allan Poe died in obscurity in 1849. Yet, Poe’s forlorn and haggard visage has become a ubiquitous presence in today’s popular culture. His current celebrity status as the ‘master of horror’ is due to his association with Universal Studios and American International Pictures, who appropriated his work for their cycles of horror films. This chapter explains Poe’s current celebrity status as ‘the master of horror’ by arguing that this peculiar afterlife is the result of a carefully thought-out branding of Poe’s identity by his biographers and a commercial culture industry that carefully appropriated and amalgamated his life story and his horror tales, framing Poe as the perfect poster-boy for the genre.
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van Leeuwen, E.J. (2016). Hero of Horror: Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849). In: Franssen, G., Honings, R. (eds) Celebrity Authorship and Afterlives in English and American Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55868-8_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55868-8_3
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