Edgar Allan Poe’s stature as a major figure in world literature is primarily based on his ingenious and profound short stories, poems, and critical theories, which established a highly influential rationale for the short form in both poetry and fiction. Before Poe was three years old both of his parents died, and he was raised in the home of John Allan, a prosperous exporter from Richmond, Virginia. As a boy, Poe attended the best schools available, and was admitted to the University of Virginia at Charlottesville in 1825.
In 1835 Poe accepted an editorship at The Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, bringing with him his aunt and his 12-year-old cousin Virginia, whom he married in 1836. The Southern Literary Messenger was the first of several journals Poe would direct over the next 10 years and through which he rose to prominence as a leading man of letters in America. Poe made himself known not only as a superlative author of poetry and fiction, but also as a literary critic whose level of imagination and insight had hitherto been unapproached in American literature.
Poe wrote poems that were intended to be read aloud. Experimenting with combinations of sound and rhythm, he employed such technical devices as repetition, parallelism, internal rhyme, alliteration, and assonance to produce works that are unique in American poetry for their haunting, musical quality. In “The Bells,” for example, the repetition of the word “bells” in various structures accentuates the unique tonality of the different types of bells described in the poem.
Today, Poe is recognized as one of the foremost progenitors of modern literature, both in its popular forms, such as horror and detective fiction, and in its more complex and self-conscious forms, which represent the essential artistic manner of the 20th century.
Poet, novelist, critic, and editor Dave Smith was born in Portsmouth, Virginia.
Smith has published more than a dozen volumes of poetry, including Little Boats, Unsalvaged: Poems 1992–2004 and The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems, 1970–2000, which was chosen as the Dictionary of Literary Biography’s Book of the Year in Poetry. Influenced by Robert Penn Warren, James Dickey, and A.R. Ammons, Smith writes layered, expansively narrative free-verse poems that deal with history and regional identity. He has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Rita Dove was U.S. Poet Laureate from 1993-1995 and Special Consultant in Poetry for the Library of Congress bicentennial in 1999/2000; she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004-2006. She received the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her book Thomas and Beulah.
Tom Wolfe was born in Richmond, Virginia, the son of Helen Perkins Hughes Wolfe, a garden designer, and Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Sr., an agronomist and editor of The Southern Planter. He turned down admission to Princeton University to attend Washington and Lee University in Virginia. Later he received his PhD from Yale in their American Studies Program.Wolfe experimented with four literary devices not normally associated with feature writing: scene-by-scene construction, extensive dialogue, multiple points of view, and detailed description of individuals’ status-life symbols in writing this stylized form of journalism. He later referred to this style as literary journalism. Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (about the hippy/LSD culture of Ken Kesey) is considered a striking example of Wofe’s new journalism.
In 1970, he published two essays in book form as Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. “Radical Chic” was a biting account of a party given by composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein to raise money for the Black Panther Party. “Mau-Mauing The Flak Catchers” was about the practice by some African Americans of using racial intimidation (“mau-mauing”) to extract funds from government welfare bureaucrats (“flak catchers”). Wolfe’s phrase, “radical chic”, soon became a popular derogatory term for critics to apply to upper-class leftism.
William Styron was born in the Hilton Village historic district of Newport News, Virginia. He grew up in the South and was steeped in its history. His birthplace was less than a hundred miles from the site of Nat Turner’s slave rebellion, later the source for Styron’s most famous and controversial novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, the fictitious memoirs of the historical Nathaniel “Nat” Turner, a slave who led a slave rebellion in 1831.
Despite public defenses of Styron by leading artists of the time, including James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, numerous other black critics reviled Styron’s portrayal of Turner as racist stereotyping. Despite the controversy, the novel was a runaway critical and financial success, and won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Born in Richmond, Virginia Ellen Glasgow spent many summers at her family’s Louisa County, Virginia estate, the historic Jerdone Castle plantation, which her father bought in 1879, and would later use that setting in her writings. .A lifelong Virginian who published 20 books including seven novels, Glasgow portrayed the changing world of the contemporary South, differing from the idealistic escapism that characterized Southern literature after Reconstruction.
In 1941 Ellen Glasgow published In This Our Life, the first of her writings to take a bold and progressive attitude towards black people. Glasgow incorporated African Americans into the story as main characters of the narrative, and these characters become a theme within the novel itself. By portraying the blatant injustices that black people face in society, Glasgow provides a sense of realism in race relations. Critics hailed the novel as a “masterpiece,” and it won the Pulitzer Prize and was adapted as a movie by the same name, directed by John Huston and released in 1942.
Rita Mae Brown lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she lived briefly with American actress, author, and screenwriter Fannie Flagg, whom she had met at a Los Angeles party hosted by Marlo Thomas. They later broke up due to, according to Brown, “generational differences”, although Flagg and Brown are the same age.
In 1979, Brown met and fell in love with tennis champion Martina Navratilova. In 1980, they bought a horse farm in Charlottesville where they lived together until their breakup, over Navratilova’s then concern that coming out would hurt her application for U.S. citizenship (according to The Washington Post). Brown still lives on the estate in Charlottesville.
James Branch Cabell was an American author of fantasy fiction and belles-lettres. His works were considered escapist and fit well in the culture of the 1920s, when they were most popular. Cabell was born into an affluent and well-connected Virginian family, and lived most of his life in Richmond. Cabell matriculated at the College of William and Mary in 1894 at the age of fifteen and graduated in June 1898. While an undergraduate, Cabell taught French and Greek at the College. According to his close friend and fellow author Ellen Glasgow, Cabell developed a friendship with a professor at the college which was considered by some to be “too intimate” and, as a result Cabell was dismissed, although he was subsequently readmitted and finished his degree. During his life, Cabell published fifty-two books, including novels, genealogies, collections of short stories, poetry, and miscellany. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1937. Cabell died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1958 in Richmond.
Douglas Southall Freeman was an American historian, biographer, newspaper editor, radio commentator, and author. He is best known for his multi-volume biographies of Robert E. Lee and George Washington, for both of which he was awarded Pulitzer Prizes.
