This biography of Edgar Allan Poe, a giant of American Literature who invented both the horror and detective genre, is a portrait of extremes: a disinherited heir, a brilliant but underpaid author, a temperate man and uncontrollable addict.

Examines the life, work, and accomplishments of this celebrated writer of poetry, horror, and detective stories and his impact on American literature.

The life of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49) is the quintessential writer’s biography—great works arising from a life of despair, poverty, alcoholism, and a mysterious solitary death. It may seem like a cliché now, but it was Poe who helped shape this idea in the popular imagination. Despite or perhaps even inspired by his many hardships, Poe wrote some of the most well-known poems and intricately crafted stories in American literature. In Edgar Allan Poe,Kevin J. Hayes argues that Poe’s work anticipated many of the directions Western thought would take in the century to come, and he identifies links between Poe and writers and artists such as Walter Benjamin, Salvador Dalí, Sergei Eisenstein, and Jean Cocteau. Whereas previous biographers have tended to concentrate on the sorry details of Poe’s life, by contrast Hayes takes an original approach by examining Poe’s life within the context of his writings. The author offers fresh, insightful readings of many of Poe’s short stories, and presents newly-discovered information about previously unknown books from Poe’s library, as well as updated biographical details obtained from nineteenth-century newspapers and magazines. This well-researched biography goes beyond previous scholarship and creates a complete picture of Poe and his significant body of work. Approachably written, Edgar Allan Poe will appeal to the many fans of Poe’s work—from “The Raven” to the “Tell-Tale Heart”—as well as readers interested in American literary history.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was an American original-a luminous literary theorist, an erratic genius, and an analyst par excellence of human obsession and compulsion. The scope of his literary achievements and the dramatic character of Poe's life have drawn readers and critics to him in droves. And yet, upon his death, one obituary penned by a literary enemy in the New York Daily Tribune cascaded into a lasting stain on Poe's character, leaving a historic misunderstanding. Many remember Poe as a difficult, self-pitying, troubled drunkard often incapable of caring for himself. Poe reclaims the Baltimore and Virginia writer's reputation and power, retracing Poe's life and career. Biographer and critic James M. Hutchisson captures the boisterous worlds of literary New York and Philadelphia in the 1800s to understand why Poe wrote the way he did and why his achievement was so important to American literature. The biography presents a critical overview of Poe's major works and his main themes, techniques, and imaginative preoccupations. This portrait of the writer emphasizes Poe's southern identity; his existence as a workaday journalist in the burgeoning magazine era; his authority as a literary critic and cultural arbiter; his courtly demeanor and sense of social propriety; his advocacy of women writers; his adaptation of art forms as diverse as the so-called gutter press and the haunting rhythms of African American spirituals; his borrowing of imagery from such popular social movements as temperance and freemasonry; and his far-reaching, posthumous influence. James M. Hutchisson, Charleston, South Carolina, is a professor of American literature and southern studies at The Citadel.

A compact biography of Edgar Allan Poe and his close associates, Mr. Poe and Dr. Moran, will prove useful and entertaining to a wide range of readers. It is based exclusively on authentic historical documents and incorporates passages from many sources which became accessible only after the year 2000, following the introduction of searchable Internet databases. True-to-life portraiture of the “historical Poe” has always been problematic. Within a day or two after his death in October 1849, Poe's biography began to be distorted by fabrications and apocrypha. Oddly enough, the foremost fabricator was also our most intimate and outspoken eyewitness. The Baltimore physician Dr. John J. Moran, M.D., tried to comfort Poe on his deathbed and then wrote a tactlessly explicit letter of condolence to his anguished next of kin. Twenty-five years later that same Dr. Moran embarked on a protracted campaign to circulate a thoroughly fabulous account of his patient’s diagnosis and the circumstances surrounding his final hours. Traces of these notorious fibbings continue to pop up without warning in slipshod popular biographies as well as in medical journals. About the Author Dwight Thomas is descended from the Welsh mariner John Thomas, the captain of the vessel which brought the first English settlers to the colony of Georgia in 1733. He grew up in Savannah and attended Emory University in Atlanta. During the Vietnam War he served in the United States Army. Subsequently he received a doctoral fellowship in the English Department of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He went on to collaborate with the veteran Poe scholar David K. Jackson in preparing The Poe Log (1987), a thousand-page encyclopedic reconstruction of the poet’s career. Dr. Thomas is a lifetime member of the Modern Language Association. In 2009 he served as keynote speaker at the bicentennial convention of the Poe Studies Association.