Product Description

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

• Amazon Sales Rank: #345168 in Books
• Published on: 1997-11-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 804 pages

Review

"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

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.

Customer Reviews

Solid and old-fashioned biography
A meticulous and massive work that piles fact upon fact. This is a reprint of a 1941 work, and the author, Quinn, was born in 1875. He is concerned to defend Poe's reputation against charges of immorality. More background about the marriage to Virginia would have been interesting. How common were such marriages in Virginia at that time? Was the full age of 21 claimed on the marriage bond legally necessary? I don't know if Silverman's 1992 biography has this, I might try it, but 750 pages on Poe is enough for now. If you really need to see an exact reproduction of the title page of Poe's textbook of conchology, this is the book for you.

I worship at the altar of Poe.
As a lifelong fan of Edgar Allan Poe, I admit that I worship at the altar of Poe. Therefore it was a delight to discover this most excellent bio, extensively researched by another worshipful fan (from an earlier era) of American's greatest short story writer. This is a must for your reference library. I read and absorbed every single page. I'm grateful that the author followed his own lifelong passion for Poe and went against the grain of Poe bashing biographers of his time, and produced this work that extols Poe's positive character features while not neglecting the negatives. Compare this bio with other "negative" Poe bios of the past (esp. early 20th century), still available in libraries, and you'll understand why it was such a pleasure for me to find this particular book which provides a more balanced picture of the artist's life and career.

An Exhausting Accumulation Of Often Superfluous Facts
First published in 1941, Arthur Hobson Quinn's critically acclaimed Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography is a dry, strictly academic work which presents its readership with over 700 dense pages containing thousands of thoroughly researched 'hard' facts concerning the life of one of America's greatest literary figures, but which completely neglects to create a vibrant, three-dimensional, shadow-casting portrait of the writer himself.

Throughout the volume, its human subject remains little more than a blank, three-letter sieve endlessly referred to as "Poe": "Poe lived up to his standard...", "Poe signalized his departure from the editorial staff of...", "Poe wrote the critical notices for October and November...", "Poe did not lecture, however....", "Poe was still hearing echoes of his visits to Mrs. Whitman's home..."

The problem, of course, is that, despite the avalanche of facts, many of which are utterly superfluous, the reader comes no closer to gaining an understanding of the man behind them. "Who was Edgar Allan Poe?" is a fundamental question the text never comes close to providing a genuine answer to.

As Quinn's evaluation of Poe's prose and poetry is routinely perfunctory and unexceptional, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography is a work that few readers, with the exception of committed Poe scholars, are likely to find worthwhile or engrossing.