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Two weeks after begging for a non literary work, Harper and Brothers in New York published Poe\'s first book of fiction. A 200 page volume entitled \"The narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, of Nantucket\". The publishing had been delayed for about a year, to July 1838, because of the economic depression, and a pirated version appeared in London a few months later.
Pym was a classic adventure story, bringing the hero into trouble frequently and leading the reader into a world of illusions where nothing is what it seems. Friends turn out to be enemies, enemies to be friends, people in motion seen from afar turn out to be rotting corpses when seen from a shorter distance. Apart from the illusions an important ingredient is disorder, concerning everything from material disorder to social disorder.
The fictional figure, Arthur Gordon Pym, seems to have a lot in common with Edgar Allan Poe. They have similar names, both are born in New England, Pym arrives in Tsalal in January 19, Poe\'s own birthday. Pym is a son of a \"respectable trader in sea- stores\" and get an academic upbringing expecting to inherit his grandfather. Many characters in Pym resembles people in Poe\'s surroundings, and the names are anagrams of real names, or at least resemble them.
Pym attracted about two dozen reviews in New York, Philadelphia and London. Many was positive and praised Poe for creating entertaining adventures. Unfortunately Poe did not get much credit for writing Pym since his name was not presented at the title page but was only mentioned in the preface. How much money Poe made on Pym is uncertain but it cannot have been much since he continued to beg and take loans. The English pirated version did, of course, not pay at all.
In early 1839 two short works by Poe appeared in a Baltimore magazine, the American museum of science, Literature and the Arts. \"The Haunted Palace\" which was a return to verse, handled the theme of rebellion, also discussed in Pym. In \"Ligeia\" Poe perfected the tale of the revenant, the person returned from the Other World. The narrator\'s one and only love dies and leaves him helpless as a child, which immediately makes him search for a new caretaker, Rowena. But he cannot love Rowena as he had loved Ligeia, and his efforts to forget Ligeia conceals a stronger need to remember. Ligeia\'s rebirth tells of how the beloved lives within yourself, never die and are always ready to return. This shows of Poe\'s tendency to dwell over the past, and the failure of letting it go.
Usher and Rue Morgue
The Fall of the House of Usher
Poe\'s time with Burton\'s was one of the busiest periods of his life. He wrote, among other things, 89 book reviews but also a huge amount of articles on various topics. One of his most famous contributions was however, \"The Fall of the House of Usher\". \"Usher\" was a classic horror story with conventional Gothic features such as stealthy servants, sounds of heavy iron doors and collapsing buildings. The greatness in the tale is not in its novelty on the subject but how Edgar treated it. The language he uses is technically advanced and sets the mood in a very efficient way. The Ushers are named after Noble Luke Usher and Harriet L\'Estrange Usher, who had performed with Eliza and David Poe.
While \"Usher\" uses older Gothic conventions, \"William Wilson\" shows of more social realism, the two tales has a lot in common though. Wilson treats a man that kills himself and yet lives, which shows of Poe\'s denial of death. In both \"Usher\" and \"Wilson\" we can see this tendency that nothing stays buried, and in both stories it is the lead character clinging on to his past. Roderick Usher keeps Madeleine\'s body in the house, and William Wilson cannot hate his rival, the other Wilson. Wilson realizes that when he kills the other Wilson he has in fact killed himself. So Wilson can\'t escape his image and Roderick can\'t escape his twin, because in both cases their \"doubles\" are parts of themselves.
This \"doubling\" is common in Poe\'s work and in Gothic literature in general. The doubling can be connected, not only between the characters in his stories, but to his own past. Wilson\'s birthday is for example on the 19th of January, like Edgar\'s own, and in some versions of the story the year of birth (1809) is also correct. Wilson also went to the school of \"Doctor Bransby\" which was the name of Edgar\'s schoolmaster in England.
Even though Poe produced work of high quality during his time at \"Burton\'s\" the pay was not very good and Poe was forced to loan money and freelance. In Alexander\'s Weekly Messenger he invited people to submit their own ciphers. The ciphers were all of the same kind where the alphabet had simply been substituted, and they were relatively simple to decipher. the naive readers of Alexander\'s failed to realize this though and he gained a reputation of being an ingenious analyst.
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