What About Edgar?

In assessing The Atlantic Monthly’s December list of the 100 “most influential figures in American history”--a rundown of dead folks that includes everyone from Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt to Martin Luther King Jr., Mark Twain, and Herman Melville--critic-blogger Jerome Weeks points out what I agree is an egregious blindspot. “The lack of Edgar Allan Poe is also curious,” he writes. “Not as poet or critic or fantasist. But as the inventor of the detective story, another hugely popular art form that America created.” Read more here.