Looming large in the popular imagination as a serious poet and lively
drunk who died in penury, Edgar Allan Poe was also the most celebrated
and notorious writer of his day. He died broke and alone at the age of
forty, but not before he had written some of the greatest works in the
English language, from the chilling "The Tell-Tale Heart" to "The
Murders in the Rue Morgue"--the first modern detective story--to the
iconic poem "The Raven."
Poe's life was one of unremitting hardship. His father abandoned the
family, and his mother died when he was three. Poe was thrown out of
West Point, and married his beloved thirteen-year-old cousin, who died
of tuberculosis at twenty-four. He was so poor that he burned furniture
to stay warm. He was a scourge to other poets, but more so to himself.
In the hands of Paul Collins, one of our liveliest historians, this
mysteriously conflicted figure emerges as a genius both driven and
undone by his artistic ambitions. Collins illuminates Poe's huge
successes and greatest flop (a 143-page prose poem titled Eureka), and
even tracks down what may be Poe's first published fiction, long hidden
under an enigmatic byline. Clear-eyed and sympathetic, Edgar Allan Poe
is a spellbinding story about the man once hailed as "the Shakespeare of
America."
