Edgar Allan Poe Challenges You to Crack the Code

EDGAR ALLAN POE CHALLENGES YOU TO CRACK THE CODE; WIN $2,500

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Dec. 21, 1999 -- Fascinated by codes and secret writing? Here's a chance to prove your puzzle skills and win $2,500.

The poet and mystery writer Edgar Allan Poe challenged his readers to create cryptographs for him to solve. Although Poe was able to decipher approximately 100 of these cryptographs, two remained unsolved by the writer.

Those two cryptographs were sent to Poe by a Mr. W.B. Tyler. In the mid-19th century, Louis Renza published "Poe's Secret Autobiography," in which he proposed that Tyler was Poe's nom de plume, after a search failed to find a W.B. Tyler living in any major eastern city.

Although the first of the two ciphers was solved by Terence Whalen in 1992, no one has managed to crack the second cipher.

Hoping that the deciphering of it will clear up the 150-year-old mystery as to whether Tyler was Poe's nom de plume, Shawn Rosenheim, an English professor at Williams College, has teamed up with Bokler Software Corp. to sponsor the Edgar Allan Poe Cryptographic Challenge.

Information about the contest can be obtained at www.bokler.com/ eapoe.html. Entries should be submitted by email to poe.challenge@ bokler.com and by fax to 256-539-9313.

"Since no one's cracked the cipher, there's no new evidence one way or another," Rosenheim said. Rosenheim, a specialist in 19th century American literature, teaches courses at Williams College in American fiction and film studies. He is the co-editor of "The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar Poe to the Internet."

The entries will be judged by Rosenheim, Stephen Rachman, a professor of English at Michigan State University and William Lenhart, a professor of mathematics at Williams.

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