A Day at the Poe House

I visited the Edgar Allan Poe house (yes, yes, I was in the Poe house...so don't make that joke, I already did) this afternoon to hear a lecture by Edward Pettit, a local (Philadelphia) Poe expert. The subject of the talk, however, was author George Lippard, who was a good friend of Poe's--one of the few who stayed a friend of his to the very end. Lippard was, in his day, a huge best-selling writer with his novel The Quaker City or The Monks of Monk Hall. It was, as Pettit informed us, a kitchen sink of a novel, filled with endless acts of depravity, nightmarish hallucinations, an evil cabal of the wealthiest men in the city, premonitory visions of the decayed Philadelphia of 1950, and, lest that fail to do you in, necrophilia. No wonder it was so popular.

Lippard was a novelist, editor, publisher, and a proto-Marxist who campaigned for the rights of the downtrodden. His output was prodigious--approximately a million words a year for the ten years he wrote before his untimely death from consumption. He is all but forgotten now (in fact he was referred to as a forgotten author by the 1870s), but Pettit and others are attempting to rescue from obscurity this gothic novelist of grotesque and noir sensibilities. And while we're at it, the same for Charles Brockden Brown!

If any of that sounds like fun, go to http://omnigatherum.com/blog.html
where you can read pieces of Lippard's work; or to Pettit's Ed and Edgar blog at http://bibliothecary.squarespace.com/

gf out