Keith Steinbaum's Blog (16)

Edgar Allan Poe’s works were disregarded at first in the United States, but they gained soaring popularity after well-known French poet Charles Baudelaire, whose own writings were influenced by Poe, gave them recognition in the period around 1850.  As the years have passed since then, his stories and poems have been immortalized from the classroom, to film, to the numerous authors who count Poe as a major influence on their own literary creations.…

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Although my book, The Poe Consequence, features ideas borrowed more from The Tell-Tale Heart and The Pit and the Pendulum, I do utilize one very important concept concerning specific lines from one of Edgar Allan Poe’s most renowned works, “The Fall of the House of Usher.” First published in the year 1839, this remarkably horrifying Gothic tale features a dark, depressing landscape, a haunted mansion, a strange disease, and a dead body. http://bit.ly/1N4MRf0

Is tarot card reading real? Can someone who wears flowing robes foretell the future just by looking at the cards, or is tarot reading simply an elaborate scam to entice you to spend your money? Let’s try to look at things from a neutral point of view and learn more about both sides. http://bit.ly/1XptEcM

In the first chapter of my book, The Poe Consequence, the reader is introduced to a mysterious psychic named Madame Sibilia.  Her grim demeanor and ominous interpretation of the Tarot Cards during a reading launches a series of events that spiral out of control and is a major premise of the story.

The following is a brief history of the origin of Tarot Cards http://bit.ly/1ON9YAh

“If gang tattoos function as representations of the contested identities of socially excluded youth, gang graffiti functions as one of the indicators of contested boundaries of gang influence or control.” – Something interesting I read on this site.

What are the purposes of gang rivalries?  The issues of money, drug trafficking, extortion, robberies, homicide, prostitution, and other organized crime…

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Death is life’s greatest mystery.  Is there life after death? The resurrection of Christ is a well-documented event, but did it really happen? Has anyone really come back from the dead?  Is there any concrete evidence that this is even possible? Interviewing someone who died is obviously quite challenging, unless you consider a person ‘dead’ whose heart stopped pumping for a few minutes.  Well, technically a person is considered medically dead if his heart stops. So, maybe we can start…

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Since time immemorial, humans have been haunted by this question: Do ghosts exist?

The belief in ghosts is present in most cultures around the world. In European folklore, they are the souls of the dead who come back to haunt or harm the living. In Chinese traditions, ghosts of ancestors are believed to be able to communicate with the living through a medium.

Ghosts are called by many names and are thought to manifest themselves in various forms, yet they all have one defining…

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As is often the case with other Edgar Allan Poe stories, the first-person narrator in “The Pit and the Pendulum” is unnamed, and what he has done, and whether he is guilty of a wrongdoing or not, is not known.   As we are introduced to the beginning of this particular story, we soon learn of the horrifying dilemma faced by the teller of the tale; in this case, the sufferings of unrelieved mental torture. - See more at:…

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The Tell-Tale Heart is one of Poe’s most famous short stories. It’s about an unnamed narrator who tells the story of a murder he committed to prove he is sane, but in the telling of the story, we see that he is not. The nameless narrator kills an old man for one bizarre reason: the old man’s vulture eye. - See more at: http://thepoeconsequence.com/the-tell-tale-heart/#sthash.KdrB17bj.dpuf

Just as Edgar Allan Poe’s fictional characters obsessed over objects like a vulture’s eye, a black cat or death itself, there’s something about his poems and short stories that we can’t ignore. Perhaps it’s because his kind of horror is something not easily forgotten, for it can disturb the subconscious, thrill us to the bone, and reveal the darkest tendencies of the human mind. - See more at:…

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The Goth Connection



Edgar Allan Poe died more than 160 years ago, yet his lasting legacy still occupies an honored position in that dark corner of literature, reminding us of the dark side of human nature.  Because of this, the question has often been asked if he could be considered the first goth, or, certainly, one of that subculture’s earliest influences.



- See more at:…

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Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, yet is considered a “son of Baltimore.” He came from a Baltimore family, spent a part of his life there, and died in the city. It’s been said that his literary career was ignited when he won a contest sponsored by the Baltimore Saturday Visiter.



His last surviving residence in Baltimore was opened as a historic house in 1949 and is home to the Edgar Allan Poe Society. The brick building, located at 203 North Amity Street, was set to…

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Despite the fact that Edgar Allan Poe died more than 160 years ago, his poetry and stories remain controversial and popular.  Not only have his writings continued to be discussed and examined in the classroom, but also, for more than a century, his poems and stories have been adapted into screen, television, stage and other forms of creative media.  According to The Atlantic, “The long-gone author… has 251 movie- or TV-writing credits and counting.”



No discussion or lecture in…

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Edgar Allan Poe, master of the macabre, is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre. Timeless prose and poems such as The Tell-Tale Heart and The Raven still give spine-chilling experiences and grim amusement to readers, even though more than a hundred sixty years have passed since he died.  As it turns out, Poe’s life and death were as captivating as his legendary stories and characters. His wife died at the age of 24, which, coincidentally, is the same age of death as both…

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Edgar Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts on January 19th, 1809, to travelling actors, David Poe, Jr. and Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe. David left the family when Edgar was only a year old, and the following year, Elizabeth succumbed to pulmonary tuberculosis.  John and Frances Valentine Allan, from whom he acquired his middle name, served as his foster parents, though they never formally adopted him.  Due to John Allan’s success as a merchant in Richmond, Virginia, Edgar attended…

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In addition to being credited as the inventor of the detective fiction story, Edgar Allan Poe was arguably the most important American author of the gothic suspense genre.  He was not just an author, but also a poet, editor, and literary critic, and his life and death, like so many of his works, were shrouded in mystery. - See more at:…

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