Tag Archives: 19th Century-Science

Poe’s First Published Story about a Shipwreck Foreshadows Eureka: A Prose Poem (Part I of II)

By Murray Ellison Poe’s first important tale, “MS. Found in a Bottle,” (1833) won the Baltimore Visiter’s first prize for fiction. Poe scholar, Thomas Mabbott calls it a “masterpiece,” contending that “winning the contest set the author on the way to lasting fame” (Tales and Sketches 131). The Visiter wrote that “Poe’s tales are eminently distinguished…