One night a theater critic answered his door to find an actor so angry over a review that he threatened the critic. The actor was a twenty-three year old David Poe, Jr. (1784-?), future father of Edgar Allan Poe. That review is the Poe Museum’s Object of the Month for June.
Although little is known of David Poe’s life, most of what is documented concerns his acting career. Several museums and libraries, including the Poe Museum, hold important collections of newspapers containing notices of his performances in major East Coast cities. These documents provide information about his ...
collections
Poe Museum Aquires Important Sculpture
The Edgar Allan Poe Museum has recently acquired a life-sized statue of Edgar Allan Poe produced in 1957 by the artist Charles Rudy. The sculpture, which depicts a seated Poe holding a pen and paper, is Rudy’s plaster model for the bronze statue now in the Virginia State Capitol Square. This is the first full-length sculpture to enter the Poe Museum. The piece is a gift from the James A. Michener Art Museum in Honor of Lorraine Rudy.
According to Poe Museum Curator Chris Semtner, “This is a major addition to the Museum’s collection not only because it is one of a few full-length life-sized ...
Poe Museum’s May Object of the Month: Poe’s Autobiography
Just this morning I was asked how Poe would feel about the exaggerated image of himself in today’s popular culture. After all, the Poe Myth most people “know” bears only a passing resemblance to the hard-working, innovative author who changed the face of literature almost two centuries ago. Would he be offended that some of the less reputable text books and biographies portray him as a madman or that his ghost was a character on the cartoon Southpark?
The Poe Museum’s Object of the Month might help shed some light on Poe’s own relationship with the mythmaking that continues to grow up around ...
Poe Museum Announces Object of the Month for April 2014
For the Poe Museum’s April 2014 Object of the Month, we have selected these candelabra which once belonged to the subject of three of Poe’s poems, “To M.L.S.,” “To Marie Louise,” and “The Beloved Physician.” In A June 1848 letter, Poe described her as “the ‘Beloved Physician,’… the truest, tenderest, of this world’s most womanly souls, and an angel to my forlorn and darkened nature.”
Born in 1821 in Henderson, New York, Marie Louise Barney was the daughter of a country doctor. By the time she was twelve, she started accompanying her father on medical rounds. At about age sixteen, she ...