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 It is based exclusively on authentic historical documents and incorporates passages from many sources which became accessible only after the year 2000, following the introduction of searchable Internet databases.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.

Occurring in a time of primitive medicine and inconsistent record-keeping, Poe’s death has become one of the enduring mysteries of American literature. David F. Gaylin’s book marks the first attempt to offer a comprehensive and balanced study of this historical event. After chronicling the circumstances that may have contributed to the poet’s death, the book examines key details about the story. It traces Poe’s movements and personal encounters before also exploring how Poe was handled and treated by others who attempted to come to his aid. Proceeding with the liveliness of a detective story, the discussion sheds new light on these events, and it offers new information about the burial of Poe’s body and the subsequent relocations of his tomb. With the addition of supplementary reference materials including a register of formally proposed causes of death, a timeline of relevant events, and a map of Poe’s final movements in Baltimore, this book is an essential resource for both scholars and general readers seeking answers to the mystery of Poe’s death.

Containing more than three hundred poems, including nearly a hundred previously unpublished works, this unique collection showcases the intellectual range of Claude McKay (1889-1948), the Jamaican-born poet and novelist whose life and work were marked by restless travel and steadfast social protest. McKay's first poems were composed in rural Jamaican creole and launched his lifelong commitment to representing everyday black culture from the bottom up. Migrating to New York, he reinvigorated the English sonnet and helped spark the Harlem Renaissance with poems such as "If We Must Die." After coming under scrutiny for his communism, he traveled throughout Europe and North Africa for twelve years and returned to Harlem in 1934, having denounced Stalin's Soviet Union. By then, McKay's pristine "violent sonnets" were giving way to confessional lyrics informed by his newfound Catholicism. McKay's verse eludes easy definition, yet this complete anthology, vividly introduced and carefully annotated by William J. Maxwell, acquaints readers with the full transnational evolution of a major voice in twentieth-century poetry.

Most frequently regarded as a writer of the supernatural, Poe was actually among the most versatile of American authors, writing social satire, comic hoaxes, mystery stories, science fiction, prose poems, literary criticism and theory, and even a play. As a journalist and editor, Poe was closely in touch with the social, political, and cultural trends of nineteenth-century America. Recent scholarship has linked Poe's imaginative writings to the historical realities of nineteenth-century America, including to science and technology, wars and politics, the cult of death and bereavement, and, most controversially, to slavery and stereotyped attitudes toward women. Edgar Allan Poe: Beyond Gothicism presents a systematic approach to topical criticism of Poe, revealing a new portrait of Poe as an author who blended topics of intellectual and social importance and returned repeatedly to these ideas in different works and using different aesthetic strategies during his brief but highly productive career. Twelve essays point readers toward new ways of considering Poe's themes, techniques, and aesthetic preoccupations by looking at Poe in the context of landscapes, domestic interiors, slavery, prosody, Eastern cultures, optical sciences, Gothicism, and literary competitions, clubs, and reviewing.