Edgar Allan Poe: His Life & Legacy (British ed.) - Hardcover

Jeffrey Meyers

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0719550238 ISBN 13: 9780719550232

Publisher: John Murray Publishers Ltd, 1992

Synopsis

Poe was the saddest and strangest figure in American literature. Jeffrey Meyers' biography portrays the unbearable tensions in his paradoxical character. He was a Virginia gentleman and the son of itinerant actors, the heir to a great fortune and a disinherited outcast, a university man who had failed to graduate, a soldier bought out of the army, a court-martialled West Point cadet, a husband with an unapproachable child-bride, a brilliant editor and a low-salaried hack, a world-renowned but improverished author, the fiance of two women who would not marry him, a normally temperate man and an uncontrollable alcoholic, a rationalist with a mystical cast of mind, a materialist who yearned for a final unity with God. Poe was the prototype of the self-destructive American writer. Throughout his life he would repeatedly strive for a desperately desired goal and, when it was nearly in reach, deliberately destroy his chance of achieving it. After attempting suicide, he tried to drink himself to death and was found in the gutter - delirious, hallucinating and comatose. Poe's life was as strange as his works and even his most bizarre stories - "The Fall of the House of Usher", "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", The Cask of Amontillado" and "The Black Cat" - were autobiographical distortions of his own experience.

About this title

About the Author:

Jeffrey Meyers is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the author of Hemingway: Life into Art, Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, and many other biographies. He lives in Berkeley, California.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Fast upon the heels of Kenneth Silverman and his splendid Edgar A. Poe (1991), Meyers (Joseph Conrad, 1991, etc.) fashions an even greater success with the same material. The strength of Meyers's approach is that it focuses on Poe's life and character, and examines his writings in historical, rather than literary, terms. This isn't a book of criticism, or even a critical biography--and, as such, it's free of the theoretical constructions so often imposed by academics upon their subjects. Poe, Meyers emphasizes, was a mess of complications and perversity- -a brilliant crank, a genteel necrophile, a plagiarist and hack who stole from his inferiors and starved while his editors grew fat-- and Meyers is able to show the depth of his insanity and genius by means of a clear and straightforward narrative of events and personalities too poignant to support much interpretation. Poe's own correspondence is drawn on to supply a vivid portrait of his brutal domestic life--the constant uprootings, the continual pleas for aid, the excruciation of his wife's slow death--and the endless (and frequently absurd) controversies that Poe carried on in print are excerpted at length. The testimonial accounts of Poe given by many of his contemporaries are remarkable for their concurrences, and constitute some of the best material in this very rich work. The notes are extensive and helpful. Vivid and haunting: a great success. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: John Murray Publishers Ltd
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0719550238
• ISBN 13: 9780719550232
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 348