The world has produced countless excellent writers, and many have shifted the course of literature in some minor way, but very few, if any, have the likes of Poe's resume.  He was not the world's greatest writer — Shakespeare will always have that status for me and many other readers — but he may have been the most influential, especially when we consider all the different ways he affected other writers and their creations.  Bill Harmon — poet, anthologist, one of my own professors in graduate school, and, as co-editor of A Handbook to Literature, possessor of a literally encyclopedic knowledge of literature — has written that "it can be persuasively argued that Poe, almost single-handedly, invented the short story, science fiction, detective fiction, the Symbolist Poem, and the New Criticism" — not bad for an orphan who could barely make a living with his pen before dying at the age of 40.  (I'm reminded of a great line that Professor Harmon once shared in a poetry class I took with him: "When Mozart was your age, he was dead.")  Like Mozart, who died at 35, Poe did a lot in his short time on earth.  Let's look at a few of his major contributions.

3. He invented an entire genre.

Have you ever read a mystery novel, watched a murder mystery, or gotten hooked on a cop show?  Of course, you have.  These things are everywhere (and there will be one more when I get that big fat contract for Book ’im, Lingo).  You have Poe to thank for lighting the spark for this wildfire.  His short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” published in 1841, was the first of three stories featuring the eccentric C. Auguste Dupin, a private citizen who outsmarted the police with his reasoning skills.  Indeed, he astounded others, including an ordinary friend who narrated the events told in the stories.  If these details sound familiar — and they very well may, even if you have not read any of these stories — then you probably know them from a different source: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories.  Doyle, who called Poe the "father of the detective tale," seems to have based Holmes at least partially on Dupin, as the two characters resemble each other.  Indeed, in one of the stories in Doyle’s series, Watson tells Holmes that he reminds him of Dupin and that he didn’t realize such a person existed outside of fiction.  (That’s a good one, Doyle.  His story is also fiction!)

Poe called his Dupin stories “tales of ratiocination,” since they involved reasoning.  Dupin is not the only one working his brain, though.  The genius of the stories is that they call on us to use our brains, as well, to try to solve the mystery.  In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Dupin sets out to identify the killer of a mother and her daughter in Paris.  (I’m writing this column in France, where I’m vacationing, by the way.  In the story, Poe indicates that Dupin and his friend lived in "a time-eaten and grotesque mansion . . . in a retired and desolate portion of the Faubourg St Germain."  I visited the Boulevard Saint Germain during my time in Paris, and I'm thinking I should shoot a Moving Experience on Poe there.  Stay tuned.)

All stories require us to use our minds—I call this newsletter Mind Travel, after all—but Poe’s tales of ratiocination, unlike other kinds of stories and novels, present an explicit mystery, drop little clues in front of us, and give us the opportunity to solve the mystery before the master detective explains it to the befuddled narrator (and, by extension, all of us).  It’s a brilliant idea, one that has kept untold millions of us glued to our pages and screens.

How are you at whodunnits — Poe's or anyone else's?  I’m terrible.  All of my study of Poe has done me little or no good.  I’ll never be a Dupin or a Holmes—or even a Columbo, although I am pretty good at losing things in my jackets.

2. He shaped the course of the short story.

It’s one thing to tell a story; it’s quite another to craft one.  Along with his contemporaries Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, Poe crafted some of the first well-known examples of the form that would become known as the “short story” (although he used the term “tale” in, for example, the title of his first collection, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque).  Poe went beyond writing masterpieces in this form, however, and wrote about the genre, providing guidance on what a short story should be.  In a review of Hawthorne’s collection Twice-Told Tales, he made a case for the value of brevity in fiction.  At that point, novels had been around for a century or so and were well-known literary forms, but the problem with a novel, as Poe saw it, is that one typically cannot read it in one “sitting.”  As a result, it is impossible for a novelist to achieve what the writer of a tale can achieve.  He explains:

In this same review, Poe made a famous pronouncement about the crafting of the short story, saying, "In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design."  Some people who do not write creatively may think of fiction as something inspired, but Poe was describing a highly deliberate process.  (He made a similar case for the deliberate craft of writing poetry in his essay "The Philosophy of Composition.")  Fellow writer Ray Bradbury said, "Poe was more influential than any writer of his time in leading the short story away from the formless, casual episode toward a higher art of more formal organization."  Bradbury added, ". . . Poe's influence on the modern short story is unmatched in English and American literature.  He gave it style, organization, dignity, and meaning and set it on the road to becoming one of the most challenging forms of fiction a writer can attempt."

1. He influenced just about every writer who followed him.

There's no escape.

That sounds like the terrifying scenario of “The Pit and the Pendulum,” where the narrator finds himself tied below a pendulum that swings closer and closer to his body.  Poe is a lot like that pendulum.  He’s tough to avoid.

During his lifetime, he was not a particularly successful writer, at least in terms of sales and notoriety.  It’s been observed, in fact, that he was better known as a critic than as a creative writer.  Things got better after his death.  (Well, his reputation got better anyway.  Whether things got better for Poe himself is impossible for us among the living to know, but I hope so.)

Poe’s biggest fan actually was a contemporary who never met him.  Charles Baudelaire, a Frenchman, read some of Poe’s work and felt a powerful kinship.  "The first time I opened one of his books," he said, "I saw, to my amazement and delight, not simply certain subjects which I had dreamed of but sentences which I had thought out, written by him twenty years before."

As others have noted, other French poets, notably Stephen Mallarme and Paul Valery, came under Poe’s spell, as did the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, France's Jules Verne, England's H. G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling, Argentina's Jorge Luis Borges, and Japan's Hiram Taro, who actually took on the pseudonym of Edogawa Rampo, which is how Poe's name would be pronounced in Japanese.

Serious writers, like serious painters and musicians, know the masters of their craft.  Many of them probably grew up reading Poe, as director Alfred HItchcock said he did, but even writers who have never read even a word of “The Raven” or “The Cask of Amontillado” (if any such writers even exist) would know Poe on some level because they have read other writers who almost certainly did read Poe’s work.  Poe transcends the six degrees of separation; he’s at most one or two degrees away from just about all of us.  At least in the Western Hemisphere, if you don’t know him, you almost certainly know someone who does.

In short, few writers have had more impact on other writers.  Rather than trying to identify all of those who have felt his influence, it might be better to ask, as author Joyce Carol Oates has said, "Who has not been influenced by Poe?"

It's clear that Poe has had an immeasurable impact on literature, but what are we to say about his impact on individual readers?  That's a topic for next week's column: "2 Sides of Poe's Brain."