Background

About Edgar Allan Poe
Information on Edgar Allan Poe, his tales and poems, including discussion questions and the teacher's guide, will be available on The Big Read's website shortly.

About The Big Read
The Big Read was started by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to restore reading to the center of American culture. The program was parked by a 2004 study that showed literary reading in America declining rapidly, at an accelerated rate, among all groups, especially among the young. Working in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services and in cooperation with Arts Midwest, the NEA has brought The Big Read to over 400 communities since the program's 2007 national launch. For more information about the national program, visit please visit The Big Read's website.

How Did Wichita Get Involved?
In 2007, National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia visited Wichita to participate in a grants workshop for arts agencies. In his remarks, he talked about this new project -- The Big Read -- and encouraged those present to create a Big Read program in Wichita. When it became clear that the Kansas Book Festival would not return to Wichita in 2008, the decision was clear: Wichita readers, as well as its lapsed and reluctant readers, deserved an opportunity to continue to participate in a community literary event. Due to the success of the first Big Read in the Wichita area in 2008 (focusing on "My Ántonia" by Willa Cather), with over 16,000 attendees and over 50 community partners and donors, partners sought a second Big Read grant for fall 2009. 

A statement from Honorary Chair Vicki Tiahrt
Congressional spouse Vicki Tiahrt made the following remarks at a June 24, 2009 media conference:

Todd and I were delighted to learn of the 2009 NEA grant for the Big Read Wichita. I am pleased to serve as Honorary Chair and look forward to another successful Big Read Wichita. Last year, with Willa Cather's life on the prairie story "My Ántonia," we started something big.  Lets do it again! 

Why? Because....

For the first time in 26 years, adult literary reading has increased, and this increase is largely credited to The Big Read.

We unabashedly ask our fellow Kansans to read serious literature-to fall in love with books.
 
And we are not alone. We join 269 other communites experiencing great American classics, going beyond ourselves and our own experiences, traveling paths and roads another has taken or maybe just dreamed, finding enlightenment, entertainment and understanding of ourselves, our world and beyond. Reading opens doors to each reader and to the culture that will never be closed.
 
Our Big Read Committee selected Edgar Allan Poe. Poe wrote nearly 200 years ago, but here in 2009, we know Poe as the taste and sound of dark and broody, as, "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,...quoth the raven nevermore." But that isn't all there is to Edgar Allan Poe. Follow Poe and he will lead us to: 

"The Bells
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight"

In a wondrously free America, a free writer's creativity is unrestrained and Poe's pen took American readers further than literature had been before into mystery; once there he went even further to kick down the door to science fiction.  America would never have known "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away" if we had not had Edgar Allan Poe.
 
We are part of something very big and very important to our community, our culture and our country. As 2009 Honorary Chair of the Big Read Wichita I invite all readers, avid, reluctant, or lapsed to join us in reading Edgar Allan Poe this fall.  We look forward to families and students reading the selected companion books and urge clubs, neighborhoods, schools, and even governing bodies to join The Big Read, attend the events and experience the creativity, friendship and fun along the way.  Even with Edgar Allan Poe we promise you laughter and fun and a really Big Read.

About Mortality and Immortality
Painted by William Michael Harnett in 1876, the oil painting is evocative of Poe's style, mood and themes and has been a favorite for visitors to the Wichita Art Museum for decades, but there's more to it than that. The following is from a speech by Chief Curator Stephen Gleissner at a June 24, 2009, media conference.

The image chosen to visually summarize the poems and tales of Edgar Allan Poe—Wichita’s choice for the Big Read 2009—is William Michael Harnett’s painting Mortality and Immortality of 1876 in the collection of the Wichita Art Museum. (Harnett, ca. 1848 – 1892)

The painting depicts a table top with a rose and four books on the left—two being the plays and poems of William Shakespeare, a favorite author of both Harnett and Poe—and on the right a violin bow wedged between a violin above and the sheet music to a duet from Bellini’s opera "Norma" below. In the back stands a snuffed-out candle, and most notably and ominously, a skull sits atop one of the volumes of Shakespeare—its teeth appearing to sink into the spine.

Mortality and Immortality  represents a very specialized subgenre of painting.  Within the genre of still-life painting, it is, first, a vanitas painting, meaning a still life that reminds us of the vanity of concern over worldly affairs, given the fragility of life.  Possessions offer false security, for their pleasures are fleeting and our mortality will render them useless.  The most extreme type of vanitas paintings include pointed symbols of the transience of life: an empty hourglass, a spent candle, and a skull—all of which act as memento mori—that is, explicit announcements of the immanence of death and the futility of human ambition.   Both Poe and Harnett were fascinated by images of death—Poe out of love of the macabre, Harnett out of a love of enigmatic, realist painting.

Wichita is extremely fortunate to have this painting, for it holds a very important place in the history of American art: Mortality and Immortality  is the first explicit memento mori painting produced in the United States.  Thus it is a fitting poster child for Poe, the creator of the first detective story ("The Murders in the Rue Morgue," 1841).

Other ways in which Harnett relates to Poe are as follows:

• First, the number of violins & other musical instruments in Harnett’s paintings, and the numerous references to music in Poe’s stories.  Among the eccentricies of Roderick Usher, for example, were his hypersensitivity to light, taste, and sound.  Poe wrote of him in "The Fall of the House of Usher":  “There were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with horror.”
• Indeed, both Harnett and Poe were fixated with objects.  They were the subject of almost all of Harnett’s paintings.  And they were indispensible to Poe, who used them to set his gothic stages and symbolically portend the tragedies to come.  Poe’s very titles are a testament to the importance of objects to him:  "MS. Found in a Bottle," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "the Black Cat," "The Purloined Letter," and "The Cask of Amontillado."
• Both Harnett and Poe mediate between the visible, terrestrial world and the invisible—even unspeakable—phenomena that lay beyond. Harnett could very subtly suggest an otherworldly unknown.  In the foreground of his compositions, objects are minutely rendered in bright light.  But as you move into the background, darkness obscures the scene—you know not what lies beyond.
• Harnett and Poe both prided themselves on their ability to observe and represent detail.   Harnett’s contemporaries, like viewers today, marvel at his ability to paint objects so realistically that they trick the eye into perceiving the images as actual objects.  Thus another art-historical term that applies to Harnett: trompe l’ oeil, French for “fool the eye” . . . into believing that the two-dimensional image is an actual three-dimensional object.
• Finally, both Poe and Harnett were championed by the French Symbolists—each held up as a master of their respective genre.

It is appropriate, therefore, that they come together in Wichita to be celebrated by the Big Read.