Name: Poe
ISBN: 9780099287674

Peter Ackroyd

Edgar Allan Poe's life (1809-1849) was Gothic, mysterious, theatrical, fatally flawed, original, dark, dazzling, satirical, inventive - in short, an ideal subject for Peter Ackroyd. Concise, dramatic and immensely readable, this is an essential and idiosyncratic addition to Ackroyd's canon of brilliant biographies.

A Life Cut Short

"Edgar Allan Poe served as a soldier and began his literary career composing verses modelled on Byron; soon he was trying out his 'prose-tales' - often horror melodramas such as The Fall of the House of Usher. As editor of the Literary Messenger he was influential among critics and writers of the American South. His versatile writings - including for example The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Raven - continue to resonate down the centuries. eter Ackroyd's biography of Poe opens with his end, his final days --- no one knows what happened between the time when friends saw him off on the steam-boat to Baltimore and his discovery six days later dying in a tavern. This mystery sets the scene for a short life packed with drama and tragedy (drink and poverty) combined with extraordinary brilliance. Tennyson described him as 'the most original genius that America has produced'. oe has been claimed as the forerunner of modern fantasy, and credited with the invention of psychological dramas (long before Freud), science fiction (before H.G. Wells and Jules Verne) and the detective story (before Arthur Conan Doyle). He influenced European romanticism and was the harbinger of both Symboli

Jeremy Anderberg

I was amazed at the dearth of major biographies of the man who many literary scholars call the most influential American writer in our nation’s history. There were two published in the early ‘90s by renowned biographers and then this shortie published about 10 years ago by the legendary Ackroyd.

While the tone wasn’t always to my liking, this brief biography of Poe satisfied my need for pure fact accumulation. I wanted to know more about Poe, and this book did it in manner that wasn’t terribly memorable, but was very readable (a big-time bonus in some cases, depending on what you’re looking for). It’s a good enough book, but I’m looking forward to whenever it may be that a new biography comes out; again, I can’t believe it hasn’t been sooner.

Poe A Life Cut Short

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