Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography

by Shawn James Rosenheim (Introduction)

Overview

Renowned as the creator of the detective story and a master of horror, the author of "The Red Mask of Death," "The Black Cat," and "The Murders of the Rue Morgue," Edgar Allan Poe seems to have derived his success from suffering and to have suffered from his success. "The Raven" and "The Tell-Tale Heart" have been read as signs of his personal obsessions, and "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Descent into the Maelstrom" as symptoms of his own mental collapse. Biographers have seldom resisted the opportunities to confuse the pathologies in the stories with the events in Poe's life. Against this tide of fancy, guesses, and amateur psychologizing, Arthur Hobson Quinn's biography devotes itself meticulously to facts. Based on exhaustive research in the Poe family archive, Quinn extracts the life from the legend, and describes how they both were distorted by prior biographies.

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781421404912
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	12/26/1997
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	864
Sales rank:	143,983
File size:	11 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Arthur Hobson Quinn (1875-1960) is also the author of American Fiction: An Historical and Critical Survey and History of the American Drama. Shawn J. Rosenheim is an associate professor of English at Williams College. He is the author of The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar Allan Poe to the Internet, also available from Johns Hopkins.

Shawn Rosenheim is associate professor of English and American Studies at Williams College.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Foreword
Preface
Chapter 1. The Heritage
Chapter 2. Richmond–The Early Years
Chapter 3. The School Days in England
Chapter 4. Richmond Again, 1820–1826
Chapter 5. The University of Virginia
Chapter 6. "Tamerlane" and the Army
Chapter 7. Hope Deferred – "Al Aaraaf"
Chapter 8. West Point and the "Poems" of 1831
Chapter 9. Baltimore – The Early Fiction
Chapter 10. The Editor of the "Messenger"
Chapter 11. Philadelphia – The "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque"
Chapter 12. At the Summit – The Editor of "Graham's Magazine"
Chapter 13. Following the Illusin
Chapter 14. New York – "The Raven" and Other Matters
Chapter 15. The "Broadway Journal" and the "Poems" of 1845
Chapter 16. Widening Horizons – Friends and Enemies
Chapter 17. "Eureka"
Chapter 18. To Helen and For Annie
Chapter 19. Richmond – The Last Appeal
Chapter 20. The Recoil of Fate
Appendices
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Without warning, without any preliminary fanfare of trumpets, a book has now appeared that towers above others of its kind, a book in which resourceful scholarship and a lucid gift of expression are happily joined. I wish I could recapture all I have recklessly said in praise of other books and concentrate it here.
—Books

From the Publisher

"Without warning, without any preliminary fanfare of trumpets, a book has now appeared that towers above others of its kind, a book in which resourceful scholarship and a lucid gift of expression are happily joined. I wish I could recapture all I have recklessly said in praise of other books and concentrate it here."

Books