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Title: 

A New Letter from Poe to Lowell on the Pioneer

Authors: Mckee, Gabriel
Keywords: Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849;Lowell, James Russell, 1819-1891
Issue Date: 2019
Publisher: Edgar Allan Poe Review
Citation: Gabriel Mckee, “A New Letter from Poe to Lowell on the Pioneer,” The Edgar Allan Poe Review 20, no. 1 (2019): 27–45, https://doi.org/10.5325/edgallpoerev.20.1.0027.
Abstract: Edgar Allan Poe’s tale “The Tell-Tale Heart” was first published in the premiere issue of the Pioneer, an ambitious and short-lived literary journal edited by James Russell Lowell and Robert Carter. In 2013, a previously unpublished letter from Poe to Lowell, dated November 24, 1842, was auctioned at Christie’s and is now in private hands. This letter contains Poe’s offer of the tale to Lowell and his first mention of its title to the editor that went on to publish it. This article, based on direct examination of the letter, provides its full text, along with a contextual discussion of the Pioneer’s brief existence and an exploration of the relationship between Poe and Lowell from their first correspondence in 1842 to their falling out and mutual criticism in the late 1840s. The newly discovered letter gives us a more complete picture of the publication of one of Poe’s best-known tales and of the relationship between two major figures of nineteenth-century American literature.
Description: This is a pre-print of a published article. For citation purposes, please refer to the published version.
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/2451/63887
ISSN: 2150-0428
Rights: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Appears in Collections:Gabriel McKee's Collection

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