Inspiration
Poe may have gotten the last name "Dupin" from a character in a series of stories first published Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in 1828 called "Unpublished passages in the Life of Vidocq, the French Minister of Police". The name also implies "duping" or deception, a skill Dupin shows off in "The Purloined Letter." Detective fiction, however, had no real precedent and the word detective had not yet been coined when Poe first introduced Dupin. The closest example in fiction is Voltaire's Zadig (1748), in which the main character performs similar feats of analysis, themselves borrowed from The Three Princes of Serendip, an Italian rendition of Amir Khusrau's Hasht Bihisht.
In writing the series of Dupin tales, Poe capitalized on contemporary popular interest. His use of an orangutan in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" was inspired by the popular reaction to an orangutan that had been on display at the Masonic Hall in Philadelphia in July 1839. In "The Mystery of Mary Rogêt", he used a true story that had become of national interest.
Read more about this topic: C. Auguste Dupin
Famous quotes containing the word inspiration:
“Shakespeare carries us to such a lofty strain of intelligent activity, as to suggest a wealth which beggars his own; and we then feel that the splendid works which he has created, and which in other hours we extol as a sort of self-existent poetry, take no stronger hold of real nature than the shadow of a passing traveller on the rock. The inspiration which uttered itself in Hamlet and Lear could utter things as good from day to day, for ever.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“For a painter, the Mecca of the world, for study, for inspiration and for living is here on this star called Paris. Just look at it, no wonder so many artists have come here and called it home. Brother, if you can’t paint in Paris, you’d better give up and marry the boss’s daughter.”
—Alan Jay Lerner (1918–1986)