You may pose the question and watch the visions of ravens and purloined letters and maelstroms dance through your friends’ heads as they try to guess which of Poe’s acknowledged works of genius had the most effect on his contemporaries, and as the clever ones among your friends try to remember in what form and under what titles those works were published. Then, after you have collected a number of wrong answers, you may reveal the truth:
The Conchologist’s First Book: or, A System of Testaceous Malacology, arranged expressly for the use of schools, in which the animals, according to Cuvier, are given with the shells, a great number of new species are added, and the whole brought up, as accurately as possible, to the present condition of the science. By Edgar A. Poe. Philadelphia: Published for the author, by Haswell, Barrington, and Haswell, 1839.
Pulling a stunt like this is probably a good way of losing some of your literary friends, so go ahead and try it if you have too many. But it is absolutely true that, of all Poe’s books, this was the best seller in his lifetime, and the only one that saw a second edition before he died.
How did Edgar Allan Poe become an authority on mollusks? He didn’t. In fact, he wrote only the preface and introduction; the rest of the book was an abridgment of a textbook by Thomas Wyatt. Rufus Wilmot Griswold, a man of prodigious critical acumen who is most famous today for unaccountably devoting his life to destroying Poe’s posthumous reputation, wrote that Poe had plagiarized the book; but it appears that Wyatt himself asked Poe to put his own name on the title page so that Wyatt could slip out from under his obligations to his previous publisher. In other words, Poe was just doing what many a successful hack has done since his time: he was lending his name, writing a few hundred words, and taking home a few desperately needed dollars.
Well, now you know more about Edgar Allan Poe than the average assistant professor of literature, who probably spends the entire semester trying to prove that Poe was or was not a racist and succeeds only in proving that he lived in the first half of the nineteenth century. But have you learned anything about Poe as an artist? Yes: you have learned that a hack may be an artist of the first rank, and that it would be unwise to judge a writer by that writer’s most popular book.