Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical BiographyJHU Press, 1997 M11 25 - 864 pages 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. " |
Contents
I THE HERITAGE | 1 |
II RICHMONDTHE EARLY YEARS | 51 |
III THE SCHOOL DAYS IN ENGLAND | 65 |
IV RICHMOND AGAIN 18201826 | 81 |
V THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA | 97 |
VI TAMERLANE AND THE ARMY | 118 |
VII HOPE DEFERREDAL AARAAF | 138 |
VIII WEST POINT AND THE POEMS OF 1831 | 166 |
XIII FOLLOWING THE ILLUSION | 346 |
XIV NEW YORKTHE RAVEN AND OTHER MATTERS | 405 |
XV THE BROADWAY JOURNAL AND THE POEMS OF 1845 | 451 |
XVI WIDENING HORIZONSFRIENDS AND ENEMIES | 496 |
XVII EUREKA | 535 |
XVIII TO HELEN AND FOR ANNIE | 572 |
XIX RICHMONDTHE LAST APPEAL | 615 |
XX THE RECOIL OF FATE | 642 |
IX BALTIMORETHE EARLY FICTION | 186 |
X THE EDITOR OF THE MESSENGER | 218 |
XI PHILADELPHIATHE TALES OF THE GROTESQUE AND ARABESQUE | 263 |
XII AT THE SUMMITTHE EDITOR OF GRAHAMS MAGAZINE | 305 |
APPENDICES | 697 |
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| 771 | |