Auguste Dupin, a brilliant, eccentric outsider who outsmarts the bumbling constabulary with analytical reasoning, Poe created the forerunner of all fictional detectives to come. In other words, he “made possible about 80 percent of contemporary literature and television programming,” says J.W. Poe changed world literature with the first detective story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, published in 1841. (The team won the Super Bowl in January 2001 with a great defense “Quoth the Ravens,” Chris Berman said on ESPN, “Never score!”) And only Poe among the literary giants has an NFL football team named for one of his works, the Baltimore Ravens. The mathematician Mike Keith reworked the poem so the number of letters in each word corresponds to the first 740 digits of pi.

Poe’s tale has inspired actors such as Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, John Cusack and Huey, Dewey and Louie. Go to YouTube and you’ll find “The Raven,” about the ill-omened creature given to chanting “Nevermore,” read aloud by Christopher Walken, William Shatner, James Earl Jones and Lisa Simpson, Homer’s daughter. Says Kirsten Mollegaard, an English professor at the University of Hawaii at Hilo who has examined Poe’s fame: “No other American writer has had as enduring and pervasive an influence on popular culture.” The stories and poems scribbled by the half-mad Romantic have shaped our national obsession with tales of chaos and darkness. But Poe is not confined to scholarly debate each January 19 hundreds of Poe fans mark his birthday (1809) with pilgrimages to Poe sites in Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York and Richmond. Like The Great Gatsby and Moby-Dick, Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher and The Cask of Amontillado are among the top 100 books assigned in American college English classes. It was just another suitably weird tribute to the most influential American author ever, a literary brand beyond the considerable dreams of Twain, Melville, Wharton, Whitman, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Becker, sitting on the floor with her charges, read aloud from a pop-up book of “The Raven.” Then she posted the photos on Facebook, where more than a million fans of some 100 Poe-themed Facebook pages lurk.

Elisabeth Becker went all the way from Wisconsin to Philadelphia last July to introduce her two young children to America’s sacred text-not the Declaration of Independence, but Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” She walked the kids into one of the most important shrines of the Poe cult, a dark and dreary hallway in the Central Library, and sat them in front of a glass case holding Grip, the raven believed to have inspired Poe’s great poem, published in 1845.

Edgar allan poe imp of the perverse