Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography - Softcover

Arthur Hobson Quinn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801857309 ISBN 13: 9780801857300

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997

Synopsis

Now in paperback―the classic, monumental biography of Poe by Arthur Hobson Quinn.

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.

About this title

About the Author

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.

From the Back Cover

Renowned as the creator of the detective story and a master of horror, the author of "The Masque of the Red Death", "The Black Cat", and "The Murders in 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 "A 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, guesswork, 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 early biographies.

Edition details

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801857309
• ISBN 13: 9780801857300
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 804