Emily Ogden, an English professor at the University of Virginia, knows that the 19th century American writer Edgar Allan Poe has a mixed reputation among scholars.

“The body of scholars of Poe are incredibly dedicated, but there’s a kind of popular quality to Poe’s work that sometimes is off-putting to people who think of themselves as having more refined taste,” she says. If there’s something schlocky about Poe’s work, Ogden adds, “it’s for a reason — he had to make money. He was a freelance writer. He was just perpetually broke.”

Even while Poe wanted to write more elevated, difficult work, she continues, “he had to sell his writing in order to make money. And so a lot of his greatest stories come from the joining of these two streams, he’s trying to sell to the popular taste, but he’s also seized by his own dark preoccupations. And some of these stories are deeply philosophical, even as they also work as murder mysteries.”

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Book column: Emily Ogden, Poe scholar, is also a fan