Edgar Allan Poe

In 1844, readers of the New York Sun were treated to a sensational feature story in which an adventurer flew across the Atlantic Ocean in a lighter-than-air balloon. Though it was presented in exquisite technical detail as news, the story's author, Edgar Allan Poe, had made it up. But the master of the macabre had to know a thing or two about science to have pulled off such a persuasive hoax, said John Tresch, a University of Pennsylvania historian of science. Indeed, Poe, who wrote about cosmology and the origin of the universe, is sometimes considered one of the earliest writers of science fiction.

On the anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe's death yesterday, the woman who loved him lit a single candle in a dark room. She settled down at her desk and remembered his "strange and sorrowful history," his creative brilliance. "Years before I met Poe, I was drawn to his writing," she said. "To hear Poe read his own poetry was a never-to-be-forgotten experience. " His letters during their courtship were passionate in the extreme, almost sentimental. The woman he wooed - Helen - fell under his spell and agreed to marry him. Her mother threatened to disown her, saying she'd rather see her daughter dead than united with the likes of Poe. Poor Helen.

He had the eye of a vulture - a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees - very gradually - I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever. - Edgar Allan Poe, from "The Tell-Tale Heart" Joseph Bierman began reading Poe's short stories and poems as a sixth grader at the Bell Oaks School in Bellmawr. "My English teacher pushed me to read Poe to keep me on track, to keep me interested," Bierman said.

Toiling away in a rented red brick "half" house at Seventh and Spring Garden Streets, Edgar Allan Poe was oblivious to everything but finishing a new short story, "The Tell-Tale Heart. " A narrow six-room add-on to the landlord's house, it was the largest dwelling Poe ever rented. He paid around $10 a month and lived there in 1843 with his wife, mother-in-law, and pet cat, Catterina. From 1838 to 1844, Poe lived in five houses in Philadelphia, but this is the only one that has survived.

Local actor Will Stutts has found a cure for the chronic unemployment that afflicts members of his profession. He specializes in re-creating historical characters in one-man shows that he has toured, according to his theater program biography, "in 35 states and Canada before an estimated audience of more than 1 1/2 million theatergoers. " Although Stutts has kept busy for nearly two decades playing such men as Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Clarence Darrow and John Wilkes Booth, he has not often been reviewed in this newspaper, because most of his performances are in schools and colleges not usually visited by critics.

Former Carolina Panthers coach Dom Capers agreed in principle yesterday to become head coach of the expansion Houston Texans. "We have reached agreement on the financial terms, but there are other terms still being negotiated," owner Bob McNair said. He said that Capers agreed to a six-year contract and that the team scheduled a news conference for tomorrow. Capers was the first coach in Carolina Panthers history and led them to the NFC title game in 1996, only the team's second year.

THE 1966 film "Daisies," directed by Vera Chytilova, created quite the stir with its vivid surrealist imagery, nonlinear plot and feminist message. The film follows two mischievous women, both named Marie, who repeatedly defy authority. Banned from theaters by the Communist party of the time, the film comes from a place of political turbulence. It's an anarchist statement that, in some ways, transmits the political attitude of the Czechoslovakian people in the late '60s. International House Philadelphia, 3701 Chestnut St., 7 p.m., Friday, $7-$9, 215-387-5125, ihousephilly.org.

Just say Poe. Try it at the moment and you're smack in the middle of a mounting controversy. In the Oct. 4-11 issue of the City Paper, local literary blogger Edward Pettit declared that Edgar Allan Poe, who flourished in Philadelphia but inconveniently died in Baltimore and is buried there, must be exhumed and reinterred in Philadelphia by his bicentenary in 2009. Baltimore Sun columnist Laura Vozzella replied with a caustic piece headlined "We Have the Body and We're Keeping Him!"

It is one of the stranger ironies of our literary history that the death of Edgar Allan Poe - father of the modern detective story - should itself be shrouded in mystery. Poe (and doubtless his prototypical sleuth C. Auguste Dupin) would be mystified by what the creators of Poe's Own Twilight Zone have made of the circumstances of his departure. It proved an ending to a tormented, if fertile, life that has tantalized scholars since he was found unconscious and dressed in someone else's clothes outside a Baltimore tavern on Oct. 3, 1849.

Many Philadelphians still think our town has a greater claim to the history of rock 'n' roll than Cleveland, which lobbied hard and won the honor of becoming the home of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the early 1980s. Now the bragging rights to literary celebrity Edgar Allan Poe are being challenged, and Ed Pettit is determined that we won't be robbed again. Pettit, a Poe scholar and Philadelphia native, is defending his hometown in a city-against-city debate during the Free Library's celebration of Poe's 200th birthday.

* THE FOLLOWING. 9 p.m. Monday, Fox 29.   EDGAR ALLAN POE has some 'splainin' to do. Women (and not a few men) will be dying on Fox starting Monday, and Poe will be there - in spirit, at least - to put a literary gloss on the horror. Not that you have to know much more than the refrain of Poe's "The Raven" to keep up with "The Following," the blood-spattered thriller that marks Kevin Bacon's entry into prime-time TV. Bacon stars as former FBI agent Ryan Hardy, who in Monday's premiere is called in to help the agency track a death row escapee whom Ryan brought to justice 10 years earlier.

The season's most gripping new series, The Following , debuts Monday night (9 p.m. on Fox29). I'd advise you not to watch. The show stars Kevin Bacon as the hunter - and foil - of a terrifying serial killer. It marks the first time a network series has attained sustained cinematic quality. But that accomplishment is a nasty double-edged sword. The pilot rivals anything you'll see at the cineplex in terms of acting, surprise, and suspense. You will go into each commercial break with your heart in your throat.

THE 1966 film "Daisies," directed by Vera Chytilova, created quite the stir with its vivid surrealist imagery, nonlinear plot and feminist message. The film follows two mischievous women, both named Marie, who repeatedly defy authority. Banned from theaters by the Communist party of the time, the film comes from a place of political turbulence. It's an anarchist statement that, in some ways, transmits the political attitude of the Czechoslovakian people in the late '60s. International House Philadelphia, 3701 Chestnut St., 7 p.m., Friday, $7-$9, 215-387-5125, ihousephilly.org.

You wouldn't know from a reading of Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination that his dead wife showed up on stilts to dance with him one night. You wouldn't suspect from the richness of his poetry and short stories that Poe and his family were starved for calories for much of their lives. And you wouldn't guess from the bitter obituary written by his literary executor and rival Rufus Griswold - who claimed that Poe "had few or no friends" and that few would grieve for him - that his reading public not only adored Poe, but would soon elevate him to the status of dark literary god. Nothing about Poe seems obvious: not the literary squabbles that cost him the support and admiration of people who could have furthered his career; not the scandals surrounding his flirtations with drugs, booze, and married women; not even the details of his mysterious death in a Baltimore hospital.

In my imagination, Edgar Allan Poe as a person is much the same as he's portrayed in the striking and beautifully staged Red-Eye to Havre de Grace : dark in mood, deliberate in tempo, flashing with brilliance, often broke and confused, routinely drunk. He is, in a strange sense, larger than life because he lives with a mental abandon that puts him at constant risk. That's probably one reason we don't know the details of his death, although some documentation exists about his last days on a lecture tour, many of them spent on trains and one of them in Philadelphia, where he once lived.

The Raven opens with Edgar Allan Poe near death on a Baltimore park bench, which conforms to what historians know about the writer's final moments. Circumstances surrounding Poe's death remain a mystery, but The Raven offers its version - we see that not long before, Poe had been trying to get money out of a newspaper publisher, which would kill just about anybody. Poe, as we learn in The Raven, was not just the genius inventor of the detective story, the proto-Goth poet, nor the swooning balladeer to the departed.

THE BEST THING about the new thriller "The Raven" is John Cusack's amped-up performance as Edgar Allan Poe. Cusack lost 30 pounds and pushed himself to the point of exhaustion to play Poe, a sometime action figure in "The Raven" who gallops on horseback through the fog and shoots guns. Cusack, however, said the really taxing aspect of the role was trying to achieve Poe's famously agitated mental state. "He was a starving writer and a pretty serious alcoholic, so I thought it was correct for him to be very lean and working on the edge.

QUOTH THE RAVEN, "Nevermore. " So says Edgar Allan Poe anyway. But what does "Nevermore" sound like with a Philly accent? Because the raven — yes, that raven — that inspired Poe's most famous work and the title of the new John Cusack-starring thriller — resides right here in town. At the Rare Book Department in the Central branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia, to be exact. Despite being an English bird by birth, the raven has resided at the library since 1971, when Col. Richard Gimbel, of the famed department-store dynasty, bequeathed the raven to the library.

BALLET MAY seem an unlikely medium for a portrayal of a horror writer's life, but Ballet Fleming does just that this weekend in "The Myth and the Madness of Edgar Allan Poe. " The performance focuses on Poe's genius, madness, and - most of all - the sorrow that plagued his life. The ballet revolves around the writer, his mother Elizabeth, surrogate father John Allan, wife Virginia, his metaphorical muse Annabel Lee, and his tormentor, the classic Raven. It draws on his stories such as "The Cask of Amontillado" and "The Tell-Tale Heart.

TAKE the ballet drama of "Black Swan" (minus the death plunge), add the urban vibe of "Step Up," and you've got RUBBERBANDance Group's "Gravity of Center. " The Montreal dance troupe, which prides itself on being a unique combination of hip-hop and ballet, sets modern dance to classical music in an effortless manner. Instead of tutus and leotards, the dancers are outfitted in street clothes. Much like an actual rubber band, the group is flexible with dance styles. RUBBERBANDance Group's themes move past classical ballet's traditional stories of tragedy and love.