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Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living
Looming large in the popular imagination as a serious poet and lively drunk who died in penury, Edgar Allan Poe was also the most celebrated and notorious writer of his day. He died broke and alone at the age of forty, but not before he had written some of the greatest works in the English language, from the chilling “The Tell-Tale Heart” to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”—the first modern detective story—to the iconic poem “The Raven.” Poe’s life was one of unremitting hardship. His father abandoned the family, and his mother died when he was three. Poe was thrown out of West Point, and married his beloved thirteen-year-old cousin, who died of tuberculosis at twenty-four. He was so poor that he burned furniture to stay warm. He was a scourge to other poets, but more so to himself. In the hands of Paul Collins, one of our liveliest historians, this mysteriously conflicted figure emerges as a genius both driven and undone by his artistic ambitions. Collins illuminates Poe’s huge successes and greatest flop (a 143-page prose poem titled Eureka ), and even tracks down what may be Poe’s first published fiction, long hidden under an enigmatic byline. Clear-eyed and sympathetic, Edgar Allan Poe is a spellbinding story about the man once hailed as “the Shakespeare of America.”
130 pages, Hardcover
First published August 26, 2014
275 people are currently reading
1924 people want to read
About the author
Paul Collins
13 books279 followersPaul Collins is a writer specializing in history, memoir, and unusual antiquarian literature. His ten books have been translated into a dozen languages, and include Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books (2003) and The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime that Scandalized a City and Sparked the Tabloid Wars (2011). He lives in Oregon, where he is Chair and Professor of English at Portland State University.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 128 reviews
July 12, 2020
"He was at all times a dreamer--dwelling in ideal realms--in heaven or hell--peopled with creatures and the accidents of his brain."
- Rev. Rufus Griswold, quoted in Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living
A solid introduction/biography of Edgar Allän Poe. I've been fascinated with Poe since being a kid in Utah, and later Virginia and a young adult in Richmond. I adore his short stories, like his poetry, and have mostly, lazily avoided his other writings. Perhaps, it is time to try to read all of his stuff. Collins does a solid job of tracing the life and literary history of Poe. I was fascinated by his relationship with other authors and editors. Collins does a good job of placing Poe in his time, but not burying Poe in his age.
- Rev. Rufus Griswold, quoted in Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living
A solid introduction/biography of Edgar Allän Poe. I've been fascinated with Poe since being a kid in Utah, and later Virginia and a young adult in Richmond. I adore his short stories, like his poetry, and have mostly, lazily avoided his other writings. Perhaps, it is time to try to read all of his stuff. Collins does a solid job of tracing the life and literary history of Poe. I was fascinated by his relationship with other authors and editors. Collins does a good job of placing Poe in his time, but not burying Poe in his age.
January 19, 2023
Edgar Allan Poe, by the time he wrote down the phrase “The fever called ‘Living’” – in his poem “For Annie” (1849) – was impoverished, in poor health, and desperately lonely, two years after the death of his beloved wife Virginia. The forty-year-old poet was also, though he could not have known it, in his last year of life; by the end of 1849, he would die, under mysterious circumstances and from unknown causes, in a Baltimore hospital. How fitting, then, that Paul Collins has taken the phrase The Fever Called Living and made it the subtitle of this brief Poe biography.
Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living, at only 107 pages of text, is brief by design. Collins’s book is part of the Icons series of concise biographies published by New Harvest, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Books published in the series so far include biographies of Jesus of Nazareth, Joseph Stalin, Lucian Freud, J.D. Salinger, Vincent Van Gogh, Alfred Hitchcock, Hannah Arendt, Paul of Tarsus, David Lynch, Benazir Bhutto, and of course Edgar Allan Poe – truly an eclectic list of icons.
It is fortunate – and striking, considering the book’s status as part of a series called “Icons” – that Collins, a professor of English at Portland State University, takes the reader’s focus away from Poe as icon, and invites the reader to concentrate on Poe as a hard-working writer. This theme is emphasized right from the book’s beginning; Collins opens with the familiar though now-lapsed tradition of the “Poe Toaster’s” annual late-night visits to Poe’s Baltimore grave on the anniversary of Poe’s birth. But then Collins encourages us to ignore the colorful manifestations of EAP fan culture embodied by the Poe Toaster, “and instead watch the Baltimore Sun reporter taking notes from the perimeter. There, and not amid the weathered tombstones, is the reality of the living and working writer. Poe’s reputation was not earned through tragedy, but in spite of it: he was a careful craftsman of words, and a man whose deep dedication to understanding art is often obscured by the drama around his life” (p. 1).
I like that focus and emphasis. Widespread awareness of the difficult circumstances of Poe’s life has no doubt done much to give Poe his, well, iconic status as an embodiment of the Romantic artist whose bleeding heart beats on through one tragedy after another. But Poe was a writer first and foremost, and one who produced some of the greatest American literature, in a variety of genres, under the most difficult circumstances imaginable. That part of Poe’s story is inspiring.
Considering the brevity of Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living, it is doubly impressive that Collins provides persuasive explanations for a number of the mysteries surrounding Poe’s life. When, for example, Collins considers biographers’ puzzlement at the odd scenario of Poe’s foster father John Allan sending the young Poe to the University of Virginia without sufficient funds to study there, Collins suggests that “It is hardly a mystery to any first-generation student. John Allan was an immigrant who never attended college; what he understood was business, secondary schools, and the occasional tutor fee….Of the time and money necessary for college, and its cultivation of sheer intellectual curiosity, he was ignorant” (p. 13).
It is a sensible explanation; and that freshness of perspective marks many parts of this biography, as when Collins, looking at Poe’s time as an enlisted man in the United States Army, suggests that “the U.S. Army has the distinction of being the only institution to steadily support and appreciate the talents of Edgar Allan Poe while he was still alive” (p. 20).
Collins takes particular care in tracing the development of Poe’s literary art. Poe’s early prose, Collins suggests, while following the sensationalist literary norms of his time, “still lacked a compelling narrator. In particular, a charismatic, manic first-person presence was needed to bring alive Poe’s use of dread and terrified sensation”, because, “though Poe could mock the form [of sensationalism], he hadn’t learned how to transcend it” (p. 25). In contrast, by the time of Poe’s failed verse drama Politian (1835), the young writer was learning from his prior mistakes: “With his genius at haunting narrators and an emerging commitment to plot structure, Poe now was growing closer to a mastery of his art” (p. 31).
As mentioned above, Collins concentrates well on the practicalities of Poe’s life as a working author. Knowing the vagaries of a writing life – the book is dedicated to Dave Eggers, “who gave me my first break as a writer” – Collins looks at how Poe’s life choices affected his career. When it comes to Poe’s penchant for writing often savage reviews of the work of fellow authors, for instance, Collins writes that “The careers of the author and the reviewer mix with deceptive and dangerous ease. Reviews are quick but paltry money, distracting from the work that makes a writer’s reputation; they are transient in their effect on readers, but lasting in their damage to a writer’s professional relations” (p. 34). Similarly, aspiring writers who think they will make their first mark in short stories before going on to write The Great American Novel might benefit from Collins’s somber advice, in the context of publishers’ repeated rejections of Poe’s proposals of a volume of his short stories, that “authors receive precisely the same rejections from publishers even today. Short fiction sells poorly and is an extravagance barely tolerated even in established writers” (p. 35). So get back to work on that novel, alright?
As any Poe biographer should do, Collins recognizes Poe’s singular achievements. Aptly, Collins describes Poe’s 1841 short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the world’s first true mystery story in the modern sense, as “initiating the world’s most popular genre of fiction”, and therefore as “literally the most influential short story of the nineteenth century” (p. 49). And his later tale of ratiocination “The Purloined Letter” (1844), featuring as it did the same detective character of C. Auguste Dupin, arguably went even further in placing “deductive analysis and problem solving at the center” of the mystery story; “The Purloined Letter” illustrates how the appeal of the mystery genre lies not in bloodshed or violence, but rather in “the bringing of order to disorder, and causality to the seemingly inexplicable” (pp. 59-60).
Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living is, as mentioned above, brief; indeed, I would hazard a surmise that authors writing for the Icons series are told very strictly what the word limit for books in this series is. But Collins tells Poe’s sad and compelling story in a concise and effective manner. Edgar Allan Poe may have conquered “the fever called ‘Living’” in 1849, but the literature he wrote has transcended the passage of time.
Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living, at only 107 pages of text, is brief by design. Collins’s book is part of the Icons series of concise biographies published by New Harvest, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Books published in the series so far include biographies of Jesus of Nazareth, Joseph Stalin, Lucian Freud, J.D. Salinger, Vincent Van Gogh, Alfred Hitchcock, Hannah Arendt, Paul of Tarsus, David Lynch, Benazir Bhutto, and of course Edgar Allan Poe – truly an eclectic list of icons.
It is fortunate – and striking, considering the book’s status as part of a series called “Icons” – that Collins, a professor of English at Portland State University, takes the reader’s focus away from Poe as icon, and invites the reader to concentrate on Poe as a hard-working writer. This theme is emphasized right from the book’s beginning; Collins opens with the familiar though now-lapsed tradition of the “Poe Toaster’s” annual late-night visits to Poe’s Baltimore grave on the anniversary of Poe’s birth. But then Collins encourages us to ignore the colorful manifestations of EAP fan culture embodied by the Poe Toaster, “and instead watch the Baltimore Sun reporter taking notes from the perimeter. There, and not amid the weathered tombstones, is the reality of the living and working writer. Poe’s reputation was not earned through tragedy, but in spite of it: he was a careful craftsman of words, and a man whose deep dedication to understanding art is often obscured by the drama around his life” (p. 1).
I like that focus and emphasis. Widespread awareness of the difficult circumstances of Poe’s life has no doubt done much to give Poe his, well, iconic status as an embodiment of the Romantic artist whose bleeding heart beats on through one tragedy after another. But Poe was a writer first and foremost, and one who produced some of the greatest American literature, in a variety of genres, under the most difficult circumstances imaginable. That part of Poe’s story is inspiring.
Considering the brevity of Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living, it is doubly impressive that Collins provides persuasive explanations for a number of the mysteries surrounding Poe’s life. When, for example, Collins considers biographers’ puzzlement at the odd scenario of Poe’s foster father John Allan sending the young Poe to the University of Virginia without sufficient funds to study there, Collins suggests that “It is hardly a mystery to any first-generation student. John Allan was an immigrant who never attended college; what he understood was business, secondary schools, and the occasional tutor fee….Of the time and money necessary for college, and its cultivation of sheer intellectual curiosity, he was ignorant” (p. 13).
It is a sensible explanation; and that freshness of perspective marks many parts of this biography, as when Collins, looking at Poe’s time as an enlisted man in the United States Army, suggests that “the U.S. Army has the distinction of being the only institution to steadily support and appreciate the talents of Edgar Allan Poe while he was still alive” (p. 20).
Collins takes particular care in tracing the development of Poe’s literary art. Poe’s early prose, Collins suggests, while following the sensationalist literary norms of his time, “still lacked a compelling narrator. In particular, a charismatic, manic first-person presence was needed to bring alive Poe’s use of dread and terrified sensation”, because, “though Poe could mock the form [of sensationalism], he hadn’t learned how to transcend it” (p. 25). In contrast, by the time of Poe’s failed verse drama Politian (1835), the young writer was learning from his prior mistakes: “With his genius at haunting narrators and an emerging commitment to plot structure, Poe now was growing closer to a mastery of his art” (p. 31).
As mentioned above, Collins concentrates well on the practicalities of Poe’s life as a working author. Knowing the vagaries of a writing life – the book is dedicated to Dave Eggers, “who gave me my first break as a writer” – Collins looks at how Poe’s life choices affected his career. When it comes to Poe’s penchant for writing often savage reviews of the work of fellow authors, for instance, Collins writes that “The careers of the author and the reviewer mix with deceptive and dangerous ease. Reviews are quick but paltry money, distracting from the work that makes a writer’s reputation; they are transient in their effect on readers, but lasting in their damage to a writer’s professional relations” (p. 34). Similarly, aspiring writers who think they will make their first mark in short stories before going on to write The Great American Novel might benefit from Collins’s somber advice, in the context of publishers’ repeated rejections of Poe’s proposals of a volume of his short stories, that “authors receive precisely the same rejections from publishers even today. Short fiction sells poorly and is an extravagance barely tolerated even in established writers” (p. 35). So get back to work on that novel, alright?
As any Poe biographer should do, Collins recognizes Poe’s singular achievements. Aptly, Collins describes Poe’s 1841 short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the world’s first true mystery story in the modern sense, as “initiating the world’s most popular genre of fiction”, and therefore as “literally the most influential short story of the nineteenth century” (p. 49). And his later tale of ratiocination “The Purloined Letter” (1844), featuring as it did the same detective character of C. Auguste Dupin, arguably went even further in placing “deductive analysis and problem solving at the center” of the mystery story; “The Purloined Letter” illustrates how the appeal of the mystery genre lies not in bloodshed or violence, but rather in “the bringing of order to disorder, and causality to the seemingly inexplicable” (pp. 59-60).
Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living is, as mentioned above, brief; indeed, I would hazard a surmise that authors writing for the Icons series are told very strictly what the word limit for books in this series is. But Collins tells Poe’s sad and compelling story in a concise and effective manner. Edgar Allan Poe may have conquered “the fever called ‘Living’” in 1849, but the literature he wrote has transcended the passage of time.
July 21, 2014
As with other historical authors of note, there have been so many different biographies and books written about the life and times of Edgar Allan Poe. Yet, as I am a curious sort, I tend to read every one that I can get my hands on. Previously to this one, I found myself quite disappointed with the vast majority of them. Most of the time this was for two main reasons, which I shall note later in this review. This book delighted and surprised me.
This author took a different approach. Rather than treating this man as though he were a villain or a hero, he instead took a much appreciated far more neutral approach. In this particular book, Paul Collins did not treat Poe as if he were some rare anomaly, but rather discussed the hardships and high points of Poe's life. I think this is the first work of non-fiction about Poe' life that I actually felt like he was being portrayed as human in. No parlour tricks, no illusions that he was something dark and macabre to be feared. Just a man on a streak of bad luck and bad decisions.
I was impressed by the author's meticulous research and that he seemed to hit most of the valid and important parts of Poe's personal life and career from the beginning. Unlike many other biographies on the man, this book did not centrally focus on the publication of the Raven, nor the drinking habit which the author later became synonymous with. His actions are debated somewhat here and there, but are not put under a 21st century microscope of morality. I like it when the author can allow a story (especially in non-fiction) to tell itself with little interference in the way of the author's personal interjections.
This is not a long book, but has more than just the simple, basic Poe info in it. If you are a fan of Edgar Allan Poe or just curious about a man who led an intriguing life of poverty and moderate success, then this would be a good book for you to choose.
Recommended.
This review is based on a complimentary copy from the publisher and provided through Netgalley. All opinions are my own.
This author took a different approach. Rather than treating this man as though he were a villain or a hero, he instead took a much appreciated far more neutral approach. In this particular book, Paul Collins did not treat Poe as if he were some rare anomaly, but rather discussed the hardships and high points of Poe's life. I think this is the first work of non-fiction about Poe' life that I actually felt like he was being portrayed as human in. No parlour tricks, no illusions that he was something dark and macabre to be feared. Just a man on a streak of bad luck and bad decisions.
I was impressed by the author's meticulous research and that he seemed to hit most of the valid and important parts of Poe's personal life and career from the beginning. Unlike many other biographies on the man, this book did not centrally focus on the publication of the Raven, nor the drinking habit which the author later became synonymous with. His actions are debated somewhat here and there, but are not put under a 21st century microscope of morality. I like it when the author can allow a story (especially in non-fiction) to tell itself with little interference in the way of the author's personal interjections.
This is not a long book, but has more than just the simple, basic Poe info in it. If you are a fan of Edgar Allan Poe or just curious about a man who led an intriguing life of poverty and moderate success, then this would be a good book for you to choose.
Recommended.
This review is based on a complimentary copy from the publisher and provided through Netgalley. All opinions are my own.
September 1, 2014
For those interested in a brief and well-written biography of the man, author Paul Collins' "Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living" is a perfect place to start. At less than 120 pages (including a few pages of Notes and recommendations for additional reading), the book's five engaging chapters fly by quickly. By his own admission, this book adds little "unusual or even unique" material to the subject of Poe's often calamitous life, and his strange death, but that's no discredit to Collins -- as one of America's most beloved authors and the widely-acknowledged inventor of the modern detective story, there's already a voluminous trove of scholarly information available about Poe and his work. However, any reader keener to wade rather than drown in Poe's murky pool will be glad for Collins' book.
September 5, 2014
I would have given this book four stars but after this book I read an anthology of Edgar Allan Poe's work. This book included some biographical information on Poe.
Edgar Allan Poe was an orphan and raised in a foster family. Collin's book fails to mention that Poe had foster siblings and that his foster father remarried(his foster family never officially adopted him). I feel these details are critical to understanding Edgar Allan Poe. In addition, I felt that Collins did not come up with much new material on the life of Edgar Allan Poe.
However, Paul Collins' book is a "literary" biography. I felt Collins critiques of Poe's work was excellent. I did not realize how influential Edgar Allen Poe was as a writer. Thanks to Collins's book, I could see the influence Poe had on such European authors as Jules Verne, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and most notably Sir Arthur Cannon Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Thanks to Paul Collins' book, I did see how Edgar Allen Poe invented the mystery story and came up with the idea of a detective who was the forerunner and inspiration for Sherlock Holmes.(In my opinion, Edgar Allan Poe is a very hard writer for moderns to read and is mainly significant for his ideas that influenced other writers). It was also interesting to find out that even in his own time people made fun of his poetry; there are not many poets who claim Poe was his/her inspiration. Also Poe wrote a lot of book reviews which were very critical of the book and made him some enemies among other writers.
In short, I found Paul Collins biography of Edgar Allan Poe readable but not very original. What makes this book distinguished is where Collins describes the influence Edgar Allan Poe had on other writers.
Edgar Allan Poe was an orphan and raised in a foster family. Collin's book fails to mention that Poe had foster siblings and that his foster father remarried(his foster family never officially adopted him). I feel these details are critical to understanding Edgar Allan Poe. In addition, I felt that Collins did not come up with much new material on the life of Edgar Allan Poe.
However, Paul Collins' book is a "literary" biography. I felt Collins critiques of Poe's work was excellent. I did not realize how influential Edgar Allen Poe was as a writer. Thanks to Collins's book, I could see the influence Poe had on such European authors as Jules Verne, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and most notably Sir Arthur Cannon Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Thanks to Paul Collins' book, I did see how Edgar Allen Poe invented the mystery story and came up with the idea of a detective who was the forerunner and inspiration for Sherlock Holmes.(In my opinion, Edgar Allan Poe is a very hard writer for moderns to read and is mainly significant for his ideas that influenced other writers). It was also interesting to find out that even in his own time people made fun of his poetry; there are not many poets who claim Poe was his/her inspiration. Also Poe wrote a lot of book reviews which were very critical of the book and made him some enemies among other writers.
In short, I found Paul Collins biography of Edgar Allan Poe readable but not very original. What makes this book distinguished is where Collins describes the influence Edgar Allan Poe had on other writers.
March 30, 2016
I bought this on a whim - I think it was one of those $1.99 Kindle specials that show up in my email. It is an ultra-short biography, the actual text being only 108 pages, followed by some Notes. Collins' writing style is immensely readable, being as much fiction-like as perhaps Erik Larson, though admittedly without Larson's more exciting story.
The only Poe I've read is his The Murders in the Rue Morgue: The Dupin Tales. It is a master of narrative voice—and above all, the creation of the detective story—that made Poe an author that Lincoln and the world at large placed beside Shakespeare.
The only Poe I've read is his The Murders in the Rue Morgue: The Dupin Tales. It is a master of narrative voice—and above all, the creation of the detective story—that made Poe an author that Lincoln and the world at large placed beside Shakespeare.
"The character and works of Poe have ever been held in reverence by the metaphysical minds of the Scottish universities," reported one newspaper in 1875. It was the fall of that year that the University of Edinburgh enrolled a young Arthur Conan Doyle. In Poe's tales of Dupin, the medical student found the artistic catalyst for his training in physical observation and diagnosis. The result was one of the great literary creations of his time: Sherlock Holmes.But Poe was himself such a sad man. After his wife Virginia died, he was at a complete loss. He had always had bouts of drunkenness, which he called his "illness" and when the love of his life was gone, it got even worse. The next couple of years were the worst years of his alcoholism.
The hallucinations may have been delirium tremens—for at forty, Poe's body was finally beginning to rebel. When he turned up a week later at the door of his fellow gothic novelist George Lippard, he was in even worse shape—wandering penniless through a local cholera epidemic, starving and wearing only one shoe. Poe collapsed into a corner of Lippard's office, his head in his hands.Collins has some other titles that look interesting and, though I might not read any more Poe, I hope to find myself in front of another book by Paul Collins.
November 20, 2022
A very good, elegantly-written short biography of Poe with a good balance of attention to his life, character, and work. Includes a good bibliography/further reading section. Would definitely recommend to those interested in a fair, charitable short account of Poe’s life but don’t want to do a deep dive into one of the longer scholarly biographies.
November 9, 2023
Please write more 100 page biographies! When you want more than a YouTube video’s worth of information but don’t have time for every detail. I really appreciated this overview of Poe’s life. Was it depressing? Of course. He drank himself into a seriously delusional state towards the end of his life, scattered his best work abroad in various publications, and died in debt. But he invented two of the genres that are mainstays in our books and movies: horror and detective stories. (He inspired Arthur Conan Doyle!)
January 8, 2020
This is a very thorough biography of Poe, in spite of how slim a volume it is.
The book goes through Poe's life, with good references towards his works. It provides a compelling view of Poe's struggle with both alcohol and his need to be respected and heard. There is some literary criticism throughout which rounds out the volume. I left it knowing far more about Poe than I went in knowing, and indeed wanting to know a fair bit more. There was less attention afforded to Griswold than I expected there to be - Griswold being the man left in charge of Poe's works and estate after his death and who largely defamed Poe's name rather than managed his work - but that was explained away as having been dealt with more heartily in other volumes.
All in all this book serves as a very accessible introduction to Poe's life and work. It made me miss reading Poe, and seemed altogether a fine sort of read so near to Poe's birthday. I'd recommend it readily, although I do want to read more biographies of him that perhaps would lean a bit more heavily on primary source material. This book does have a nice bibliography in the back for just such purposes.
The book goes through Poe's life, with good references towards his works. It provides a compelling view of Poe's struggle with both alcohol and his need to be respected and heard. There is some literary criticism throughout which rounds out the volume. I left it knowing far more about Poe than I went in knowing, and indeed wanting to know a fair bit more. There was less attention afforded to Griswold than I expected there to be - Griswold being the man left in charge of Poe's works and estate after his death and who largely defamed Poe's name rather than managed his work - but that was explained away as having been dealt with more heartily in other volumes.
All in all this book serves as a very accessible introduction to Poe's life and work. It made me miss reading Poe, and seemed altogether a fine sort of read so near to Poe's birthday. I'd recommend it readily, although I do want to read more biographies of him that perhaps would lean a bit more heavily on primary source material. This book does have a nice bibliography in the back for just such purposes.
March 6, 2018
Definitely one of the shortest, quickest but most fulfilling biographies of Poe I’ve ever read. If you don’t want to get into a ton of detail and the supposed symbolism behind every piece of Poe’s writing, this is the book for you. Great start to finish with a ton of follow up reading listed (some of which now sit on my TBR). My first five star read of 2018!
#Poe #EdgarAllanPoe #EAPoe #EAP
#Poe #EdgarAllanPoe #EAPoe #EAP
September 8, 2018
Great palette cleanser after a terrible book I just read. Love Poe’s work and really enjoy reading more about his life, though lived tragically gave us detective fiction, one of my favorite genres. Collins clearly did his homework and it shows in his clear writing. Wonderful read.
September 19, 2018
Concise, accessible and insightful, this short biography of Edgar Allan Poe is an excellent introduction to the man and his work. Well-researched, readable and entertaining, I very much enjoyed it.
October 24, 2019
Good but short biography of Poe, an excellent pre-Halloween read.
September 20, 2014
I love Paul Collins' writing. He has a gift for weaving the fruits of dutiful research into compelling prose. Since many of his more entertaining pieces deal with 19th century eccentrics, it seems fitting that his first true biography is on Poe.
As an English teacher, I've had my fair share of moments with Poe, mostly from sharing his more popular works (The Raven, The Bells, The Masque of the Red Death, The Cask of Amantillado, et al.) with teenagers, some who share a fascination of the grotesque with the author. I'm excited to know a little background on these bits of the canon.
But, as Collins reminds us, what an author deemed his most important works and what his audience celebrates are not always the same. So reading about Poe's misfires and numerous numerous professional failures was even more engrossing. Collins frequently paints Poe as a gifted craftsman, whose talents grew with each new stretch into new territory.
This was like $3 on Amazon. Go buy it already, if you're even remotely interested in Poe.
As an English teacher, I've had my fair share of moments with Poe, mostly from sharing his more popular works (The Raven, The Bells, The Masque of the Red Death, The Cask of Amantillado, et al.) with teenagers, some who share a fascination of the grotesque with the author. I'm excited to know a little background on these bits of the canon.
But, as Collins reminds us, what an author deemed his most important works and what his audience celebrates are not always the same. So reading about Poe's misfires and numerous numerous professional failures was even more engrossing. Collins frequently paints Poe as a gifted craftsman, whose talents grew with each new stretch into new territory.
This was like $3 on Amazon. Go buy it already, if you're even remotely interested in Poe.
October 12, 2018
Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most intriguing writers in American literature. His short life (he died at 40) was productive and inventive. He’s often credited with the invention of the detective story (i.e. “Murders in the Rue Morgue”), and was prolific as a writer of stories, poetry, and criticism. We know him for macabre tales like “Tell-Tale Heart” and the poem, “The Raven.” Few authors invoke such a benighted image.
Yet the popular image of Poe is a bit of a dark caricature, reflecting truths but exaggerating features for effect. Part of this exaggeration probably owes to our collective desire to romanticize the tortured artist – and Poe is as tortured as they come. However, some of the exaggeration of Poe’s faults owe to the fact that he was a harsh critic, and at least one of the authors who felt the sting of his pen found an opportunity to amplify the “drug-addled lunatic” aspect of Poe’s nature in a biography after the great author’s death. That’s not to deny that Poe had an addictive personality. He was both an alcoholic and prone to gambling away whatever funds graced his pockets.
This short biography (less than 150pp.) gives one insight into Poe’s life from birth to death in five chapters. The first of these chapters describes Poe’s childhood, which was marred by the death of his mother, abandonment by his father, and being taken in -- but not adopted -- by a foster couple. Granted the foster couple was wealthy, but Poe’s foster-father could be a harsh man and the uncertainty of not being formally adopted seemed to have weighed on Poe’s mind.
The middle chapters give special attention to Poe’s life as a writer, noting under what circumstances he was published, starting with a self-published chap book and moving through to becoming one of America’s great men of letters (though he never made enough money to live in comfort.) Poe famously married a cousin who was very young (though of legal age) at the time, and we get some insight into that relationship, which ended not terribly long before his own death. The last chapter gives the details of Poe’s demise.
I found this book interesting and educational. Collins neither gets lost in the minutiae nor give’s Poe’s life short shrift, and it feels as though he reveals the true Poe and not the T-shirt version. I would recommend this book for fans of Poe’s work and for those who are interested in the literary history of America.
Yet the popular image of Poe is a bit of a dark caricature, reflecting truths but exaggerating features for effect. Part of this exaggeration probably owes to our collective desire to romanticize the tortured artist – and Poe is as tortured as they come. However, some of the exaggeration of Poe’s faults owe to the fact that he was a harsh critic, and at least one of the authors who felt the sting of his pen found an opportunity to amplify the “drug-addled lunatic” aspect of Poe’s nature in a biography after the great author’s death. That’s not to deny that Poe had an addictive personality. He was both an alcoholic and prone to gambling away whatever funds graced his pockets.
This short biography (less than 150pp.) gives one insight into Poe’s life from birth to death in five chapters. The first of these chapters describes Poe’s childhood, which was marred by the death of his mother, abandonment by his father, and being taken in -- but not adopted -- by a foster couple. Granted the foster couple was wealthy, but Poe’s foster-father could be a harsh man and the uncertainty of not being formally adopted seemed to have weighed on Poe’s mind.
The middle chapters give special attention to Poe’s life as a writer, noting under what circumstances he was published, starting with a self-published chap book and moving through to becoming one of America’s great men of letters (though he never made enough money to live in comfort.) Poe famously married a cousin who was very young (though of legal age) at the time, and we get some insight into that relationship, which ended not terribly long before his own death. The last chapter gives the details of Poe’s demise.
I found this book interesting and educational. Collins neither gets lost in the minutiae nor give’s Poe’s life short shrift, and it feels as though he reveals the true Poe and not the T-shirt version. I would recommend this book for fans of Poe’s work and for those who are interested in the literary history of America.
December 9, 2015
I won this book in a Goodreads First Reads giveaway and I am so very thankful. Free books are wonderful! The Fever was a fun little read, a succinct and concise biography of the life of Edgar Allen Poe and a very nice primer on the father of the detective genre. While this account of Poe breaks no new ground, Poe has always captured my imagination since I was a high school kid and this book served as a rock solid refresher about the life and times of E.A. Poe. I was reminded that ...
Edgar Poe was orphaned at a very young age, later accepted into the Allan family; hence the name Edgar Allan Poe.
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While attending the University of Virginia for just a single semester, Poe ran up such a large gambling debt that he narrowly escaped debtor prison ...
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... by slipping away to Boston and later joining the army in 1827 as Edgar A. Perry. It is in Boston where Poe published his very first work under the pseudonym Henri Le Rennet.
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Not unusual, immoral or unethical at the time, Poe married his first cousin Virginia Clemm in 1836. Clemm was 13 years old; Poe was twice her age at 27 years old
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Life in the mid-1800s in America was hard. Poe lived a life of abject poverty or at best unending financial duress and constantly wrestled with the ravages of alcohol.
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While Poe's works became famously popular well after his death, he earned very little from his literary works during his lifetime and earned most of his money editing newspapers and magazines. He dreamed of owning and operating his own literary outlet but when he achieved his dream and acquired The Broadway Journal, he failed miserably and the paper failed just a few short months under his leadership.
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Poe was a very talented writer, credited with creating the detective genre when he wrote and published The Murders in the Rue Morgue, which influenced Arthur Conan Doyle and gave rise to Sherlock Holmes.
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And while he wrote some classic tales of horror and the grotesque ...
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... his first love was poetry
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Poe died on October 7, 1849, the cause of which remains a mystery to this day although alcoholism appears to be the prime suspect. He was initially interred in an unmarked grave two days after his death in the Westminster Hall and Burying Ground in Baltimore but was upgraded to larger and more identifiable accommodations in 1875.
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Rest in peace Mr. Poe!
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Edgar Poe was orphaned at a very young age, later accepted into the Allan family; hence the name Edgar Allan Poe.
While attending the University of Virginia for just a single semester, Poe ran up such a large gambling debt that he narrowly escaped debtor prison ...
... by slipping away to Boston and later joining the army in 1827 as Edgar A. Perry. It is in Boston where Poe published his very first work under the pseudonym Henri Le Rennet.
Not unusual, immoral or unethical at the time, Poe married his first cousin Virginia Clemm in 1836. Clemm was 13 years old; Poe was twice her age at 27 years old
Life in the mid-1800s in America was hard. Poe lived a life of abject poverty or at best unending financial duress and constantly wrestled with the ravages of alcohol.
While Poe's works became famously popular well after his death, he earned very little from his literary works during his lifetime and earned most of his money editing newspapers and magazines. He dreamed of owning and operating his own literary outlet but when he achieved his dream and acquired The Broadway Journal, he failed miserably and the paper failed just a few short months under his leadership.
Poe was a very talented writer, credited with creating the detective genre when he wrote and published The Murders in the Rue Morgue, which influenced Arthur Conan Doyle and gave rise to Sherlock Holmes.
And while he wrote some classic tales of horror and the grotesque ...
... his first love was poetry
Poe died on October 7, 1849, the cause of which remains a mystery to this day although alcoholism appears to be the prime suspect. He was initially interred in an unmarked grave two days after his death in the Westminster Hall and Burying Ground in Baltimore but was upgraded to larger and more identifiable accommodations in 1875.
Rest in peace Mr. Poe!
May 28, 2018
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, “If every man who wrote a story which was indirectly inspired by Poe were to pay a tithe towards a monument, it would be such as would dwarf the pyramids.” Much of poe’s writing seems a bit clunky and overwrought to me, but he wrote a few true classics and his impact on genre literature cannot be overstated. When I read The Murders in the Rue Morgue for the first time, after having spent years reading detective fiction, it was amazing to me how familiar it was, and it instantly became clear that almost all detective fiction is built on the frame of that one story. There are many works of modern crime fiction that are better than Rue Morgue, but it will never be beaten on originality, and it still holds up as a very entertaining read. He also helped lay the foundation for modern horror and science fiction (his balloon hoax story is one of my very favorite pieces of early science fiction) and deserves his spot in the pantheon of American writers.
Poe led a pretty miserable life. He was plagued by poverty, alcoholism, tragedy, debt, and his own frequently unpleasant character. In this short biography Paul Collins tells the story (which is mostly grim, but punctuated by occasional triumph) with sympathy. I enjoyed it.
Poe led a pretty miserable life. He was plagued by poverty, alcoholism, tragedy, debt, and his own frequently unpleasant character. In this short biography Paul Collins tells the story (which is mostly grim, but punctuated by occasional triumph) with sympathy. I enjoyed it.
December 16, 2017
A short, straightforward biography of Edgar Allan Poe that goes from birth to death and provides some brief literary criticism/literary context for his major stories, poems and novel. I listened to it on Audible and most of his life and his context in American publishing and periodicals of the time was particularly interesting. Paul Collins was most enthusiastic about Poe as the inventor of the detective story, almost treating everything else as sui generis dead ends.
December 14, 2022
It’s hard to write anything new on Mr. Poe, and Collins doesn’t, but he doesn’t need to. He stewards a quick but thorough trip through Poe’s life and does so with well-quoted and well-cited skill.
June 30, 2020
Poe had a cat... named Catterina....
June 2, 2022
Poe remained preoccupied throughout his life with such themes as soreness, brutality, premature burial, and the corruption of the body in the grave.
In fact, his fixation with these them indicated a strong death-wish on his part.
The yearning for self-destruction had a strapping hold upon him. His mind tended to turn indoors and bit by bit to devour itself until the very act of living became intolerable.
As a child, he had been very responsive and meditative; and on growing up he became insensitive who developed into an ego-maniac.
His egotism had developed to such an extent that on one occasion he said that he could not imagine any human being superior to himself. Notwithstanding his poverty and the repeated rejections by various women of his matrimonial proposals after his wife’s death, he remained ferociously proud of himself, and difficult to deal with.
He had no intimate friends and, as he grew older, there was nobody with whom he could have any free and frank conversations. He complained of his loneliness, but he did not try to find a solution ‘for it except by a frantic search for feminine companionship.
In early childhood he seemed to be marked out for despondency; and the seeming likelihood changed into a certainty as he grew older and older.
In fact, he was not only born unlucky but proved to be self-destructive.
Defeat after defeat afflicted him, with the result that his whole life became a slow suicide. As a child he was motherless; as an adolescent he was humiliated and pushed out into a hostile world; and as a man he met continual disappointment. He took refuge in his fantasies.
But he did not merely take refuge in fantasies; he turned them to a useful purpose.
Out of his misery came the stuff of his dreams which became the material for his poems and his stories.
The force which drove him to misery and acute hypochondria also drove him to create his literary works. From the age of twenty-two, he was faced with a life of struggle and continuous poverty, for which his nervous system was sadly ill-equipped; but his very hardships and bad luck proved, in one sense, a blessing in disguise.
The year 1844 marked the highest point of Poe’s career.
The next four years were a period of decline. In 1846 he got into a bitter quarrel with an author who had libelled him in an article published in The Evening Mirror on the staff of which Poe had himself worked.
He brought a suit for libel against the proprietors of the paper and got two hundred twenty-five dollars as damages. However, the publicity resulting from this suit did a lot of harm to his name.
In the same year Virginia’s condition became critical. She seemed to be now beyond all human aid.
On January 30, 1847, she died. In his grief Poe plunged into the writing of a mystical and pseudo-scientific work entitled Eureka in which he described his theories of the universe. He intended it as a prose-poem; and it should be regarded as such rather than as a scientific explanation of matters which Poe himself did not really understand.
Around this time Poe wrote two of his most famous poems, the darkly brooding “Ulalume” and the onomatopoetic “The Bells.” But by now he had once again taken to drinking.
During the summer of 1848, he remained horribly drunk for three weeks. In September 1848, he proposed marriage to a lady by the name of Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman whom he had first met three years before.
This lady was a widow, six years older than Poe, and she was herself a poet of sorts. On learning about his, drinking habits, she rejected his proposal of marriage. At about the same time Poe felt interested in another woman, Mrs. Nancy Richmond (the “Annie” of his poem). She was married and was living with her husband in Lowell.
Some time later, he began to woo a woman called Mrs. Sarah Anna Lewis (the “Stella” of a poem by him). She too was a poet. and her husband too was alive. In fact, her husband had hired Poe’s services to correct her verses. And, besides, there were other women in whom Poe became interested, sometimes one after the other, and sometimes simultaneously. It seems that his friendship with none of them involved a sexual relationship.
He craved for female companionship, and he thought that one or the other would fill the void in his life.
Paul Collins divides his book into six chapters:
1. The Child of Fortune
2. Manuscript Found in a Bottle
3. The Glorious Prospect
4. The Shakespeare of America
5. Nevermore
On September 22, 1849, Poe took the boat to Baltimore in order to go to New York and make preparations for the wedding.
What happened during the next few days is unknown.
On October 3, 1849, he was found lying drunk and unconscious near a polling booth in Baltimore. (It was an election day there). He was removed in his unconscious state to the Washington College Hospital. There he remained unconscious for a time.
On regaining consciousness, he began to talk incoherently. For four days his condition continued to be critical. Then at five o’clock in the morning of October 7, he uttered the following prayer: “God help my poor soul;” and he then breathed his last.
Misfortune did not stop hounding him even after his death. He had, by an error of judgment, appointed a man called Rufus Griswold his literary executor.
This choice proved to be most unfortunate because Griswold had always inwardly hated him perhaps because Poe possessed the genius which Griswold himself lacked.
Just two days after Poe’s death, Griswold published an article which proved to be a bitter attack upon Poe. And then Griswold started editing Poe’s works in four volumes.
In the third volume, Griswold inserted a biographical account of Poe, in which Poe was again fiercely criticized and censured. Griswold also went so far as to re-write some of Poe’s letters in order to do further damage to Poe’s reputation; and he even forged some letters.
Griswold’s purpose was to denigrate Poe; and he completely thrived in his purpose.
A number of writers came to the defence of Poe’s name and reputation. Among them were Mrs. Whitman and George Graham; but the harm had been done beyond repair, particularly in England.
In France, however, the famous writer Baudelaire tried his paramount to whitewash Poe’s name by translating Poe’s best works into French and also by writing a memorable essay on Poe.
Collins writes – ‘Poe could well be called the adopted son of France. Through Baudelaire’s tireless volumes of translation in the 1850s and 1860s, Poe’s poetic creed of beauty for its own sake spoke to a rising generation of bohemians and Decadent poets; his science fiction deeply moved Jules Verne, who wrote his novel The Sphinx of the Ice Fields as a continuation of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and dedicated it to Poe. It was also Baudelaire’s edition that reached Fyodor Dostoevsky, who wrote the introduction to the 1861 Russian edition of Poe’s works, just as he was on the cusp of creating his own masterpiece of tortured narration in Notes from Underground…’
Poe’s whole life was a kind of nightmare. This nightmare was even more awful than his stories. His writings were a reflection of the inner chaos that was going on in him all the time.
This book is a tale written in blood.
Do not give this book a miss –
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride
In her sepulchre there by the sea—
In her tomb by the sounding sea……..
In fact, his fixation with these them indicated a strong death-wish on his part.
The yearning for self-destruction had a strapping hold upon him. His mind tended to turn indoors and bit by bit to devour itself until the very act of living became intolerable.
As a child, he had been very responsive and meditative; and on growing up he became insensitive who developed into an ego-maniac.
His egotism had developed to such an extent that on one occasion he said that he could not imagine any human being superior to himself. Notwithstanding his poverty and the repeated rejections by various women of his matrimonial proposals after his wife’s death, he remained ferociously proud of himself, and difficult to deal with.
He had no intimate friends and, as he grew older, there was nobody with whom he could have any free and frank conversations. He complained of his loneliness, but he did not try to find a solution ‘for it except by a frantic search for feminine companionship.
In early childhood he seemed to be marked out for despondency; and the seeming likelihood changed into a certainty as he grew older and older.
In fact, he was not only born unlucky but proved to be self-destructive.
Defeat after defeat afflicted him, with the result that his whole life became a slow suicide. As a child he was motherless; as an adolescent he was humiliated and pushed out into a hostile world; and as a man he met continual disappointment. He took refuge in his fantasies.
But he did not merely take refuge in fantasies; he turned them to a useful purpose.
Out of his misery came the stuff of his dreams which became the material for his poems and his stories.
The force which drove him to misery and acute hypochondria also drove him to create his literary works. From the age of twenty-two, he was faced with a life of struggle and continuous poverty, for which his nervous system was sadly ill-equipped; but his very hardships and bad luck proved, in one sense, a blessing in disguise.
The year 1844 marked the highest point of Poe’s career.
The next four years were a period of decline. In 1846 he got into a bitter quarrel with an author who had libelled him in an article published in The Evening Mirror on the staff of which Poe had himself worked.
He brought a suit for libel against the proprietors of the paper and got two hundred twenty-five dollars as damages. However, the publicity resulting from this suit did a lot of harm to his name.
In the same year Virginia’s condition became critical. She seemed to be now beyond all human aid.
On January 30, 1847, she died. In his grief Poe plunged into the writing of a mystical and pseudo-scientific work entitled Eureka in which he described his theories of the universe. He intended it as a prose-poem; and it should be regarded as such rather than as a scientific explanation of matters which Poe himself did not really understand.
Around this time Poe wrote two of his most famous poems, the darkly brooding “Ulalume” and the onomatopoetic “The Bells.” But by now he had once again taken to drinking.
During the summer of 1848, he remained horribly drunk for three weeks. In September 1848, he proposed marriage to a lady by the name of Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman whom he had first met three years before.
This lady was a widow, six years older than Poe, and she was herself a poet of sorts. On learning about his, drinking habits, she rejected his proposal of marriage. At about the same time Poe felt interested in another woman, Mrs. Nancy Richmond (the “Annie” of his poem). She was married and was living with her husband in Lowell.
Some time later, he began to woo a woman called Mrs. Sarah Anna Lewis (the “Stella” of a poem by him). She too was a poet. and her husband too was alive. In fact, her husband had hired Poe’s services to correct her verses. And, besides, there were other women in whom Poe became interested, sometimes one after the other, and sometimes simultaneously. It seems that his friendship with none of them involved a sexual relationship.
He craved for female companionship, and he thought that one or the other would fill the void in his life.
Paul Collins divides his book into six chapters:
1. The Child of Fortune
2. Manuscript Found in a Bottle
3. The Glorious Prospect
4. The Shakespeare of America
5. Nevermore
On September 22, 1849, Poe took the boat to Baltimore in order to go to New York and make preparations for the wedding.
What happened during the next few days is unknown.
On October 3, 1849, he was found lying drunk and unconscious near a polling booth in Baltimore. (It was an election day there). He was removed in his unconscious state to the Washington College Hospital. There he remained unconscious for a time.
On regaining consciousness, he began to talk incoherently. For four days his condition continued to be critical. Then at five o’clock in the morning of October 7, he uttered the following prayer: “God help my poor soul;” and he then breathed his last.
Misfortune did not stop hounding him even after his death. He had, by an error of judgment, appointed a man called Rufus Griswold his literary executor.
This choice proved to be most unfortunate because Griswold had always inwardly hated him perhaps because Poe possessed the genius which Griswold himself lacked.
Just two days after Poe’s death, Griswold published an article which proved to be a bitter attack upon Poe. And then Griswold started editing Poe’s works in four volumes.
In the third volume, Griswold inserted a biographical account of Poe, in which Poe was again fiercely criticized and censured. Griswold also went so far as to re-write some of Poe’s letters in order to do further damage to Poe’s reputation; and he even forged some letters.
Griswold’s purpose was to denigrate Poe; and he completely thrived in his purpose.
A number of writers came to the defence of Poe’s name and reputation. Among them were Mrs. Whitman and George Graham; but the harm had been done beyond repair, particularly in England.
In France, however, the famous writer Baudelaire tried his paramount to whitewash Poe’s name by translating Poe’s best works into French and also by writing a memorable essay on Poe.
Collins writes – ‘Poe could well be called the adopted son of France. Through Baudelaire’s tireless volumes of translation in the 1850s and 1860s, Poe’s poetic creed of beauty for its own sake spoke to a rising generation of bohemians and Decadent poets; his science fiction deeply moved Jules Verne, who wrote his novel The Sphinx of the Ice Fields as a continuation of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and dedicated it to Poe. It was also Baudelaire’s edition that reached Fyodor Dostoevsky, who wrote the introduction to the 1861 Russian edition of Poe’s works, just as he was on the cusp of creating his own masterpiece of tortured narration in Notes from Underground…’
Poe’s whole life was a kind of nightmare. This nightmare was even more awful than his stories. His writings were a reflection of the inner chaos that was going on in him all the time.
This book is a tale written in blood.
Do not give this book a miss –
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride
In her sepulchre there by the sea—
In her tomb by the sounding sea……..
November 16, 2016
A literate though non-scholarly treatment (i.e., it's an enjoyable read) of Poe's life and works. If brevity is the soul of wit, this book is a great example of that - thorough, but not tendentious. I especially enjoyed the "contextualization" of Poe's stories within the gothic tradition (gee, some of them weren't so original after all), and the stories of his critical reception (to the extent there was any). If you haven't read Chuck Klosterman's "But What if We're Wrong," this is kind of a cool example of how future perceptions of a current figure may differ so vastly from the contemporary - who, in the 1840's, would have thought that the scroungy, perpetually aggrieved Poe (who apparently never let a good deed go unretaliated) would still be read, loved and celebrated 150 years later, when then popular figures such as Edward Bulwer (now remembered only for his celebrated first line, "It was a dark and stormy night...") have fallen into obloquy or oblivion.
December 13, 2017
There's no reason it should have taken me so long to read such a slim book. I just couldn't get into it, so kept putting it down in favor of other reading.
This basic biography of Poe jibes with a lot of the other information found on him in anthologies (and Wikipedia). It's written well enough and sticks to the facts in pure biography style. It just doesn't do what I think a truly good biography should do, which is to show why the titular character deserves to be known and understood beyond their most famous deed or work. I came away from this book not really knowing much more about Poe than I already did, but also not seeing him in a different way than I already did. If anything, it stuck to the usual descriptions of Poe as an arrogant, depressed mad genius drunk. Surely there was more to the man than that.
This basic biography of Poe jibes with a lot of the other information found on him in anthologies (and Wikipedia). It's written well enough and sticks to the facts in pure biography style. It just doesn't do what I think a truly good biography should do, which is to show why the titular character deserves to be known and understood beyond their most famous deed or work. I came away from this book not really knowing much more about Poe than I already did, but also not seeing him in a different way than I already did. If anything, it stuck to the usual descriptions of Poe as an arrogant, depressed mad genius drunk. Surely there was more to the man than that.
February 17, 2016
Two things that I am not really into, poetry and literary criticism. So, of course, I choose to read a book about a poet and literary critic, Mr. E. A. Poe. This book is a run of the mill biography although very well documented and executed. It paints a true to life picture of one of America’s literary giants and his triumphs and struggles. Fortunately the author is not overly in awe of Poe so the artist comes across as a flesh-and-blood man trying to balance his grandiose dreams with the necessity of paying the bills. Although most of the material is familiar ground to fans of Poe, I enjoyed how the artist placed Poe’s work in the temporal context particularly the development of “literary” magazines that are the forerunners of what we call today, pulp fiction. How Poe straddles the line between the two is most interesting.
July 10, 2014
This biography of an American icon gives a succinct account of the writer’s life. Poe’s abbreviated existence is presented with a straightforward narrative, highlighting all of his flaws, his vices, and his genius. Often misunderstood, this book illustrates how he struggled – with money, writing, addiction, and his reputation. It also offers background on his more obscure writings and his work as a critic, which often resulted in rivalries. Though dry at times, the book is still an essential portrait of Poe and his enduring legacy.
I received a complimentary copy of this book via the Amazon Vine program.
I received a complimentary copy of this book via the Amazon Vine program.
December 15, 2014
I read this in preparation of my trip to Baltimore so as to better educate myself prior to our visit to Poe's grave. I agreed with the Amazon reviewers before me... this is the perfect book for the novice Poe reader who does not want to delve into a 800+ page book. I wasn't planning on writing a thesis on the man, I just wanted to understand his life better. Collins does a fantastic job at weaving the biography into a story without incorporating too many extraneous details that would be beneficial for the Poe literary lover or student writing a paper on Poe. I appreciated this book and would recommend it to others.
July 12, 2017
I particularly enjoyed reading about the high points of the author's life--the good parts of his childhood, his success in the military, his loving marriage, his feline writing companion, Catterina--that happened in between the better known missteps and misfortunes that made him tragic figure we know as Edgar Allen Poe.
September 7, 2016
This is a good, concise biography. For a more in-depth investigation and plausible theory to the poet's demise, read John Evangelist Walsh's Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe.
February 8, 2017
Interesting but very wordy, often didn't understand whole sentence author wrote. But life of EAP definetly a difficult one as are so many artists
July 9, 2023
Edgar Allan Poe was the dark, tormented genius behind such opium-fueled fever dreams as "The Raven," "The Tell-Tale Heart," and "The Murders In the Rue Morgue." He died alone, in Baltimore, and was a drunkard whose reputation was in disarray for generations of readers. Well...not exactly, as it turns out. Poe did struggle with alcohol issues, it's true, and his death was a mysterious occurrence, but he did have a literary career with plenty of ups as well as downs. And Paul Collins does a good job of illuminating how Poe's unusual childhood may have fueled his fictions more than any chemical assistance.
"Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living" is a good, short biography and literary appreciation of the foremost Gothic author in American history, who was also responsible for the birth of the detective genre. Poe, born to theater parents who preceded their children in death soon after the birth of their last child, grew up as the kinda-sorta adopted son of a wealthy businessman who nonetheless left Edgar out of his will when he died. Always in financial difficulties in his adult life, Poe struggled to make ends meet, but he wasn't completely ignored in his time; much of his writing did strike a chord with nineteenth-century audiences. He had the misfortune to lose his wife to tuberculosis and the inability to get clean and sober for anything more than short bursts of creativity, which saw him pen many of the classic tales and poems that made his reputation especially after his death in 1849, at forty, after being found roaming the streets of Baltimore in a fog that could have been caused by anything from booze to rabies.
Collins writes a brisk, interesting look at Poe's life and the myths surrounding it, including the biographical sketch his rival Rufus Griswold provided shortly after Poe's death, which set the tone for Poe's biographers for generations to come. The Edgar Allan Poe that emerges here is less a doom-laden poet than a crafty workhorse who expended energy in creating tales that could happen in any time and which were rooted in the mysteries of the human heart more than in the supernatural (though there was that element to his work as well). This is the sort of brief biography that makes you want to read more about the subject, and I definitely think I'd be down to read a longer, more recent work of Poe biography and scholarship if I come across one.
"Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living" is a good, short biography and literary appreciation of the foremost Gothic author in American history, who was also responsible for the birth of the detective genre. Poe, born to theater parents who preceded their children in death soon after the birth of their last child, grew up as the kinda-sorta adopted son of a wealthy businessman who nonetheless left Edgar out of his will when he died. Always in financial difficulties in his adult life, Poe struggled to make ends meet, but he wasn't completely ignored in his time; much of his writing did strike a chord with nineteenth-century audiences. He had the misfortune to lose his wife to tuberculosis and the inability to get clean and sober for anything more than short bursts of creativity, which saw him pen many of the classic tales and poems that made his reputation especially after his death in 1849, at forty, after being found roaming the streets of Baltimore in a fog that could have been caused by anything from booze to rabies.
Collins writes a brisk, interesting look at Poe's life and the myths surrounding it, including the biographical sketch his rival Rufus Griswold provided shortly after Poe's death, which set the tone for Poe's biographers for generations to come. The Edgar Allan Poe that emerges here is less a doom-laden poet than a crafty workhorse who expended energy in creating tales that could happen in any time and which were rooted in the mysteries of the human heart more than in the supernatural (though there was that element to his work as well). This is the sort of brief biography that makes you want to read more about the subject, and I definitely think I'd be down to read a longer, more recent work of Poe biography and scholarship if I come across one.
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