Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography

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JHU Press, Nov 25, 1997 - Literary Criticism - 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.

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Contents

IV
xxiii
V
47
VI
62
VIII
77
IX
93
X
114
XI
134
XII
214
XXVI
636
XXVII
691
XXVIII
719
XXIX
721
XXX
724
XXXI
726
XXXII
736
XXXIII
739

XIII
257
XV
299
XVII
340
XVIII
399
XIX
445
XXI
490
XXIII
529
XXIV
566
XXXIV
741
XXXV
745
XXXVI
749
XXXVII
751
XXXVIII
757
XXXIX
765
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About the author (1997)

Arthur Hobson Quinn (1875-1960) is also the author of American Fiction: An Historical and Critical Survey and History of the American Drama. 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.

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