Edgar Allan Poe Readings to celebrate the Halloween Season
October 30 @ 6:30 pm
It will be “Mischief Night” at the Stephen Crane House, 508 4th Avenue, Asbury Park on Wednesday, October 30, at 7 PM. We will continue our tradition of Edgar Allan Poe readings to celebrate both the Halloween season and Stephen Crane’s 153rd birthday. It seems strange that two great American authors with such wildly disparate writing styles should be somehow linked. The Poe-Crane connection is due to yet another great American author. It was the 21-year-old Willa Cather who met the 23-year-old Stephen Crane in Lincoln, Nebraska, who first made the connection. According to Cather, Stephen had a copy of Poe’s short stories with him. Both Poe and Crane had such a prolific amount of writing produced in their short lives. Poe died at the age of 40 in 1849; Crane died at age 28 a half century later. We will be reading two gruesome short stories by Mr. Poe: “The Black Cat” and “The Cask of Amontillado”. Both stories involve Poe’s obsession with “immurement”: walled imprisonment as a form of execution. After the readings, we will have refreshments in keeping with the Halloween season and including a birthday cake for Stephen Crane. For those who dare to remain, we will have a screening of “Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Terror” with Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, and Basil Rathbone.
We invite all members of the Asbury Park Historical Society to join us gratis but encourage non-members to attend with a donation in any amount. Doors open at 6:30 PM with the program to begin at 7 PM. Hope to see you there!