American Masters: Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive

Pictured: Tony Award-winning and Emmy-nominated actor Denis O'Hare stars as Edgar Allan Poe in "American Masters -- Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive."

Credit: Courtesy of Liane Brandon

This program draws on the rich palette of Poe’s evocative imagery and sharply drawn plots to tell the real story of the notorious author.

Written and directed by Eric Stange (The War That Made America, American Experience: Murder at Harvard), the new documentary American Masters – Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive premieres Thursday, October 29 at 8 p.m. on WXXI-TV.  Starring Tony Award-winning and Emmy-nominated actor Denis O'Hare (This Is Us, American Horror Story, Take Me Out) and narrated by Oscar- and Tony-nominated, two-time Golden Globe-winner Kathleen Turner, American Masters – Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive explores the misrepresentations of Poe as a drug-addled madman akin to the narrators of his horror stories.

After his death, writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) became a global icon of modern literature and a pop culture brand. Best known for his Gothic horror tales and narrative poem “The Raven,” Poe’s stories are the basis of countless films and TV episodes, and have inspired even more, as has his name and image. At least four American cities claim this literary legend as their own – Baltimore, Richmond, Philadelphia and New York: an NFL football team is named after one of his poems, and his image appears on everything from the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover to lunchboxes, bobbleheads and socks. Creating the detective fiction genre with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), Poe wrote over 100 short stories and poems altogether, beginning with Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), his first published work.