PBS has a good little 2 part documentary on Edgar Allen Poe called “In Search of Edgar Allen Poe” that you can watch for free.

I’ve always been a Poe fan since I found his stories in my elementary school years. The documentary did a decent overview of his life – which was quite a story of struggles and loss in itself.

One of the things I learned was the breadth and accomplishment on his influence in many genres. He is cited as the inventor of not only the horror story, but of the detective story, and science fiction. He also wrote impressive essays on poetry, cryptography, cosmology and even the nature of the music of bells.

At the end of the documentary, there is a list of works that inspired other authors (either directly stated by the author or having obvious influence). I thought it was worth putting them here to record just how influential his work became.

• The Gold Bug
  • Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
  • William F Friedman – man who broke Japanese “Purple” cypher in WW2
• The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
  • Moby Dick – Herman Melville
  • At the Mountains of Madness – H.P. Lovecraft
  • An Antarctic Mystery – Jules Verne
• The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
  • In the House of Suddho – Rudyard Kipling
• The Man of the Crowd
  • Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
  • The Seven Old Men – Charles Baudelaire
• Murders in the Rue Morgue
  • Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories – Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Mystery of Marie Roget
  • Hercule Poirot mysteries – Agatha Christie
• The Purloined Letter
  • Nero Wolfe detective mysteries – Rex Stout
• The Oval Portrait
  • The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
• The Premature Burial
  • Ulysses – James Joyce
• Three Sundays in a Week
  • Around the World in 80 Days – Jules Verne
• William Wilson
  • Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
• Eukreka
  • Pioneering treatise on an expanding universe – Alexander Friedmann
• The Balloon Hoax
  • Five Weeks in a Balloon – Jules Verne
• The Tell-Tale Heart
  • Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Fall of the House of Usher
  • The Diamond as Big as the Ritz – F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Poetic Principle (essay)
  • Art for Art’s Sake movement
  • French Symoblists
  • The Pre-Raphaelites
• The Pit and the Pendulum
  • The Inn of the Two Witches – Joseph Conrad
• Annabel Lee
  • Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
• The Masque of the Red Death
  • The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe
• Poe’s Short stories
  • Inspired science fiction of H.G. Wells
  • Charles Baudelaire – French poet who translated Poe and popularized him in France
  • Jorge Luis Borges – Argentine short-story writer/poet that translated Poe’s work to Spanish
  • Fernando Pessoa – Portuguese poet/writer/philosopher and translator
  • Edogawa Rampo – Japanese mystery writer that introduced modern detective stories in Japan in 1920’s. Used a pen name which was the Japanese version of the name “Edgar Allan Poe”
  • Allen Ginsberg – claimed you could trace all modern literary art to Poe’s influence: Burroughs, Baudelaire, Genet, Dylan…etc
  • Roger Corman – made 7 movies based on Poe’s work
  • Stephen King
  • Alfred Hitchcock – “It’s because I liked Edgar Allan Poe’s stories so much that I began to make suspense films”
• Poe added over a thousand words to the English language including:
  • memory-stirring, normality, odorless, epilepsy, bugaboo, sentience, irreducible, multicolor, aeronaut, and cryptography