Edgar Allen Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
(1809 - 1849)
Edgar Allan Poe was a writer during the 1830s. His macabre stories were resurrected on radio programs – giving them voices of radio stars during the 1940s and 1950s. Some of Poe’s stories became the best of horror radio shows.
The radio show, Escape, was a dramatic adventure anthology that ran from 1947 until 1954 and featured on 22nd October 1947 features Poe’s tale The Fall of The House of Usher starring Paul Frees and Ramsey Hill.
Another suspenseful radio show that featured Poe’s writings was The Black Mass, a hair-raising, horror/fantasy drama that was produced by Erik Bauersfeld, a top-rated radio dramatist. The Black Mass aired on a Berkeley/Los Angeles radio channel from 1963 until 1967 and during that time, four of Edgar Allen Poe’s writings in two broadcasts, A Predicament and The Tell-Tale Heart and The Man In The Crowd and M.S. Found In A Bottle were aired on the program.
The Weird Circle was a half-hour anthology series, originally aired in 1943. The stories on this spine-chilling drama were based mostly on adaptations from popular fiction during the 19th century. Since the show was geared to presenting horror and the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe’s tales were often used. One of the advantages to presenting Poe’s and other writers’ works is that they were written primarily in first-person and easily converted to script. At least 8 of Poes's tales can be heard on Weird Circle including, The Fall of the House of Usher, Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (published 1838), William Wilson, Murders In The Rue Morgue, The Tell Tale Heart, The Cask Of Amontillado, The Oblong Box and Case Of Monsieur Valdemar.
The genesis of many of the detectives in fiction began with Edgar Allan Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue. His detective creation was C. Auguste Dupin, and his method of solving a crime was as Poe referred to it – ratiocination. Dupin was the inspiration for detectives whose deductive reasoning methods became famous by the likes of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.
The stories of Poe were also used on Suspense, Hall of Fantasy, Mercury Theater On Air, Inner Sanctum Mysteries and later on CBS Radio Mystery Theater. In 1975 to celebrate the second year of CBSRMT they presented a week devoted to the master of mystery horror and the bizarre, Edgar Allen Poe, a truly great author whose stories will live for all time. The week began with The Premature Burial in a salute to the worlds most acknowledged master of the macabre.
NBC University Theater featured The Tales of Edgar Allen Poe in a broadcast on 6th April 1949 which, included three of his stories, Noseology, The cask of Amontillado and The Fall of The House of Usher in an hour long presentation. It also presented Poe's story The Purloined Letter told as narrated by Poe himself conferring with Detective Dupin.
Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1809 to actors. Each of his parents died before he was three years old. He was raised by a tobacco merchant until Poe had a falling out with him after going into debt for gambling. Poe joined the army shortly after the falling out and was discharged before he was 20 years old. Edgar worked his way to the rank of sergeant and wrote his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, while in the army.
In 1936 he married his 13 year old first cousin Virginia who died in 1847 from Tuberculosis. He never overcame his life-long struggle with alcholism and depression and died two years after his wife on October 7th 1849 death at age 40 in a hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. The cause of his death was open to much speculation and remains a mystery.
Edgar Allan Poe was a truly great author, the master of mystery horror and the bizarre, whose stories will live for all time and as our poll shows he was for otr fans the acknowledged master of the macabre.
Happy listening my friends,
