Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography [Paperback]

Arthur Hobson Quinn (Author), Shawn Rosenheim (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 25, 1997

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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Editorial Reviews

Review

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.

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Book Description

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

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Paperback: 804 pages
• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press; 1st edition (November 25, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801857309
• ISBN-13: 978-0801857300
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #366,093 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Solid and old-fashioned biography, March 1, 2000

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D. P. Birkett (Suffern, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (Paperback)

A meticulous and massive work that piles fact upon fact. This is a reprint of a 1941 work, and the author, Quinn, was born in 1875. He is concerned to defend Poe's reputation against charges of immorality. More background about the marriage to Virginia would have been interesting. How common were such marriages in Virginia at that time? Was the full age of 21 claimed on the marriage bond legally necessary? I don't know if Silverman's 1992 biography has this, I might try it, but 750 pages on Poe is enough for now. If you really need to see an exact reproduction of the title page of Poe's textbook of conchology, this is the book for you.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I worship at the altar of Poe., August 21, 2006

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C. Williams (Pittsburgh PA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (Paperback)

As a lifelong fan of Edgar Allan Poe, I admit that I worship at the altar of Poe. Therefore it was a delight to discover this most excellent bio, extensively researched by another worshipful fan (from an earlier era) of American's greatest short story writer. This is a must for your reference library. I read and absorbed every single page. I'm grateful that the author followed his own lifelong passion for Poe and went against the grain of Poe bashing biographers of his time, and produced this work that extols Poe's positive character features while not neglecting the negatives. Compare this bio with other "negative" Poe bios of the past (esp. early 20th century), still available in libraries, and you'll understand why it was such a pleasure for me to find this particular book which provides a more balanced picture of the artist's life and career.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An incredible work about an incredible man, November 15, 2010

By 

Julie Pickett (San Diego, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (Paperback)

I stumbled across Quinn's biography of Edgar Allen Poe while doing research for my Master's thesis on Poe's work. The size of the book is daunting, but I found it amazingly easy to read (yes, it's harder to follow than Dick And Jane, but it's easier to read than a lot of academic writing) and Quinn was incredibly thorough in backing up his contentions.

He follows Poe's life from birth to death, using Poe's work; his critics; letters to, from, and about the man; and numerous other sources to paint a picture of Poe not as an opium-addicted, death-obsessed pedophile, but rather as a writer devoted to literature and his quest to elicit a visceral reaction in his reader, as well as a man devastated by the loss of his teenage wife. (Yes, Virginia was young by 21st-century standards, but Poe didn't live in the 21st century. I seem to recall hearing that Juliet was 12.)

This book may be daunting for the casual reader--804-pages daunting--but if you're looking for a biography that looks under the bed and between the sofa cushions, I definitely recommend this book. Poe will always remain a shrouded figure who died under mysterious circumstances--in large part because the man he trusted as his literary executor betrayed him--but Quinn does an amazing job at fleshing out what was going on in his life and painting as objective and complete a picture as possible.