Product Description

From a Pulitzer-Prize winning biographer, the most revealing, fascinating, and important biography of one of our greatest literary figures.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #78915 in Books
• Published on: 1992-11-04
• Released on: 1992-11-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 592 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780060923310
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
This mesmerizing chronicle of Poe's short and disorderly life incorporates fresh discoveries about the poet/storyteller's travels, relationships and literary works. Illustrations.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
YA-- A comprehensive but readable biography. Poe is pictured as a man who was obsessed by the early death of his actress mother and as one who filled his writings with themes of lost love, violent murder, and the supernatural. Particularly intriguing are his relations with his contemporaries: his constant denigration of the talents of Longfellow, other literary feuds and frauds, his penchant for reporting on bogus ``news events,'' his quarrels with his editors and backers, and his bouts with alcoholism and despair. A compelling portrait. --Richard Lisker, Fairfax Public Library, VA
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
The opening of Silverman's comprehensive biography of Poe sets the tone: 24-year-old Eliza Poe, actress and mother of three, is dying. The local paper solicits funds for this destitute and deserted woman. Her son Edgar, raised but never adopted by the Allan family, thus spends his entire life mourning his losses, beseeching others for money, enduring imagined grievances, and needing to be nurtured. Quoting extensively from letters, public records, and diaries, Silverman sheds new light on how Poe's early life influenced his work. He details Poe's turbulent career as poet, short story writer, and editor traveling between Boston and Richmond and traces his literary development through bouts of alcoholism and hallucinations and disputes with literary rivals. An excellent addition to the literature that furthers understanding of America's gothic tale-teller.
- Cathy Sabol, LRC, Northern Virginia Community Coll., Manassas
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

a vivid, analytic record of Poe's life and work
If you have enough interest in Poe to even entertain the idea of reading a biography, you should move ahead now and order a copy of this fantastic book. But you'd better have a copy of Poe's works nearby, because Silverman's book (as with all excellent literary biographies)will continually fire your yearning to revisit familiar Poe works and to discover ones you've missed. Assuming that your interest derives first from Poe's writings, you'll find Silverman's account wholly engaging. I like to thumb through it simply for Silverman's analytic synopses of Poe's poems and stories, which the author enlivens with connections between the work he's currently reviewing and earlier and later ones as well. Silverman thus offers a total panorama of Poe's interests, development, themes and aims. Indeed, the book could almost be the biography of Poe's literary accomplishment.

Silverman's finely detailed yet compulsively readable account of Poe's life is equally engrossing. The book's title is the most sensationalistic thing about it, for Silverman pursues the facts and spectualtions about Poe with deep scholarly interest but objective, rational distance--and yet he relays it all with a novelist's drive. He allows the unremittingly frustrating commingling of tragedy and success in Poe's life speak for itself. Though this is a book to be read from cover to cover, you can nonethless pick it up anywhere and find yourself immediately involved. Silverman capture's Poe's person and his art with balance and intensity in his solid biography.

Never-Ending and Evermore!
I love biographies and read a great many of them. Silverman's work on Poe is certainly my favorite bio of the American Romantic. Poe was my first and most important influence in life. I read him in middle school, and later in high school, I wrote my senior paper on his works. Since then, I have read every biography I could get my hands on. This one book is my keeper. Somehow, in his own personal way, Silverman was able to capture a side to Poe I had not really seen in earlier readings. It is subtitled a Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance, and that is exactly what it is. Here Poe comes alive, in all his glories and disappointments. It's mournful, it's detailed, and it will certainly never leave your memory. Silverman actually breathes life into Poe, and for a moment, while you are reading, you feel as though you might look over and see Edgar A sitting next to you. That's kind of nice.

Borderline Disorder Personality?
I bought this book primarily to find out Silverman's take on Poe's being found (just before his death) in clothes that did not belong to him (as indicated in a video in the Great Authors series). That odd fact, combined with the alter egos he created in stories like "Fall of the House of Usher" made me wonder if Poe had some sort of alter ego himself. Though the clothing issue is not completely explained (after all, who could know with certainty?), Silverman's book does offer insights into Poe's use of false identity, pseudonym, anonymous writing, plagiarism, and other identity issues (especially relating to his odd perversions of the Allan name and his brother's name). In addition, Poe's behavior, as explained by Silverman, put me in mind of a book entitled *I Hate You, Don't Leave Me: Understanding the Borderline Personality Disorder* by Jerold J. Kreisman and Hal Straus, published in 1989. I'm an English teacher, not a psychologist, and I do not know the current thinking on borderline personality disorder, but it is apparent that virtually every characteristic Kreisman and Straus identified in the borderline personality were exhibited by Poe. The next time I teach Poe, I plan to present information from both books for my students to consider (after reading "Fall of the House of Usher," Poe's story with a cross-gender alter ego). Thanks, Professor Silverman, for a marvelously researched and documented book!