EXHIBITION REVIEW: The Writer and Man, Evermore
Edgar Allan Poe
Exhibition Opens at the Morgan
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The
most surprising part of the Morgan exhibition is a section devoted to his
influence on fellow writers who admired or were inspired by him. These
include not just Stephen King and H. P. Lovecraft, but also Dickens, Oscar
Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle (whose Sherlock Holmes stories
were greatly influenced by Poe’s detective fiction), George Bernard Shaw (who
wrote that “Poe constantly and inevitably produced magic where his greatest
contemporaries produced only beauty”), W. H. Auden and Vladimir Nabokov
(whose unfinished screenplay for “Lolita,” on display at the Morgan, makes
explicit that novel’s debt to Poe’s poem “Annabel
Lee”).