Description: Renowned creator of the detective story and master of horror, Edgar Allan Poe seems to have derived his success from suffering and to have suffered from his success. Unlike previous biographers who often confused Poe's stories with his life, Arthur Hobson Quinn sticks meticulously to facts. Based on exhaustive research of family archives still available when the book was published in 1941, Quinn extracts the life from the legend. 48 illustrations.
Brief description: 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.
Review Quotes: 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