EDGAR ALLAN POE

Poe’s challenges.

Poe scholar Kopley brings authoritative insight to a critical biography of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) that can well be called definitive. Drawing on abundant sources, including newly available correspondence of a stepdaughter of Poe’s best friend, Kopley offers informative close readings of Poe’s poetry, reviews, and fiction, as he recounts his life, loves, aspirations, and travails. Recalled by his schoolmaster as a 12-year-old “cheerful, brimful of mirth,” Poe, according to a classmate, could be “self-willed, capricious,” and imperious; others found him sad and melancholy. Until he left for college, he lived with foster parents, enduring a vexed relationship with his foster father, John Allan. Frequently in financial trouble, Allan took out his frustrations on his young ward, providing such paltry financial support for college, for example, that Poe spent only 10 months at the University of Virginia. Drinking, gambling, fighting, and defying authority also factored into his aborted college career. Later, he enrolled at West Point, where he ended up arrested and court-martialed for dereliction of duty. A hardworking writer who dreamed of editing a literary magazine, his productivity was undermined by alcoholism. Still, as Kopley amply shows, he published a prodigious body of work: reviews, poems, and stories. In 1836, he married his 13-year-old cousin Virginia, an apparently charming young girl, fond of puppies and kittens. Evidence suggests that they had no sex for two years, and Poe, basking in his wife’s love, gave up drinking for a while. Virginia, diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1842, died in 1847, plunging her husband into deep mourning. Although Poe became a literary lion after the publication of “The Raven” in 1845, Kopley depicts a man dogged by darkness.

A richly detailed, sympathetic portrait.