Before Conrad Aiken was the U.S. Poet Laureate or the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the Bollingen Prize, the National Book Award, the National Institute of Arts and Letters Gold Medal, and the National Medal for Literature, he was a young boy growing up on Oglethorpe Avenue in Savannah, Ga.
I am a great lover of the Victorian Gothic. Crumbling castles, secret inheritances, madness, and ghosts are things I never get tired of reading about. I even wrote my Masters thesis on the use of these genre elements in film. The Southern Gothic is something that I have always felt like I couldn’t quite grasp,…