Now Watch This Drive: On the Letters of John Updike

We find this passage in a letter written by John Updike to his girlfriend Mary Entwistle Pennington on April 1st, 1952, sent from the farmhouse he was visiting in Plowville, Pennsylvania, where he had lived with his parents and maternal grandparents during high school before he went off to Harvard where he would meet Mary, a Radcliffe student, in a course on medieval sculpture. They would be engaged by the end of the year, with just over 20 years of marriage and four children ahead of them.

The Bloody Love of Poe: On Richard Kopley’s Edgar Allan Poe: A Life

A flutter of raven feathers accompanies each recitation of the name: Edgar Allan Poe. He is the “Master of the Macabre.” If we need visual assistance to remember him, we can look at the “Ultima Thule” daguerreotype, which shows him gaunt, with his left eyebrow collapsed, wearing a cravat resembling a torn bedsheet tied into a noose, his arms crossed. This is what has been made of him by the inclusion of his Gothic fictions in the short story anthologies and all the film adaptations.