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To: "Announcements" (announce@radio.com)

From: "Internet Multicasting Service" (carl@radio.com)

Subject: HarperAudio!

Content: Poe, "The Purloined Letter"

Org: Internet Multicasting Service 

Channel: Internet Town Hall
On this segment of HarperAudio!,
Actor Anthony Quayle reads Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter."  

This short story, written in 1845, features the brainy amateur detective 

C. Auguste Dupin.  Dupin is called in by G., a prefect of police, to help 

locate a letter that has been stolen from a lady of the court by a D., an

unscrupulous cabinet minister.  Dupin uses his intellect to retrieve the 

letter, and while explaining his reasoning also expounds on his theories 

of intelligence, physiognomy, and mathematics.  While the story's central 

idea of a compromising letter seems quaint these days, Poe loses most

modern readers entirely with his final line -- a classical allusion, in 

French no less.  It translates as "If such a sinister design isn't worthy 

of Atreus, it is worthy of Thyestes," two brothers of Greek tragedy.
Edgar Allan Poe was born in 1809 and died in 1849 of disease related to 

alcoholism.  In 1836 he married his 13- year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm, 

whose death 11 years later inspired the poem Annabel Lee.  Poe's career 

ranged from Richmond, Virginia, where he edited the Southern Literary

Messenger, to New York, where he ran The Broadway Journal. He is buried 

in Baltimore, Maryland.

	

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