ASIN: B019YC17ZQ
Publisher: Lume Books
Pages: 285
More than a century and a half after his death Edgar Allan Poe still remains a controversial figure, the one American literary giant of the nineteenth century about whom not only the estimate of his work, but also the very facts of his life remain in dispute.Poe has been seen variously as demon or saint, a literary dilettante or the great precursor of twentieth-century literature. Poe was all these and more, and it is the greatest virtue of Edward Wagenknecht’s study that he presents Poe in a new light: in all his complexity, but with his strengths and weaknesses judiciously balanced.As in his earlier studies of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Washington Irving, Wagenknecht looks at primary sources – the writer’s own literary work and his writings, the accounts of people who knew him – and secondary material written after his death.It is notable that Wagenknecht dismisses many of the slanders ...
