Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance

This is an excellent, highly detailed and informative biography of one of the greatest American authors and poets. Poe's life was rough from the start. His parents (David and Eliza) left him early, his father through abandonment, his mother through an early death. Young Poe was sent to live with surrogate parents, the "father" being John Allan, a wealthy merchant who wanted Poe to be something more (or at least something different) than Poe himself wanted to be. Silverman pulls no punches, painting a most realistic and unbiased account of Poe's life. For example, he tells of Poe's troubles in his early college years, with Poe blaming his troubles on the parsimonious John Allan. In reality, however, much of Poe's troubles were caused by Poe himself, via his gambling, his habit of breaking promises, of borrowing and not repaying, and so on. Silverman covers Poe's Army serivce, telling of young Edgar as Sergeant Major of Artillery, of Poe's few months at West Point (he did not graduate), of his work as a magazine writer, editor, and critic, and of Poe's most memorable triumphs--including the publication of the poem THE RAVEN, a masterpiece for which Poe is perhaps best known. Silverman also tells of Poe's almost constant grinding poverty, his relationships with women and family members, his struggles to start his own magazine, his depression, his alcoholism, and much more. My overall sense from reading this bio is that Poe was certainly a tragic figure, recognized by many during his time for being a literary genius, but not often rewarded as such. Then again, Poe's boorish, drunken behavior, his near constant begging for money, his failure to repay his debts (not to mention his almost complete lack of a business sense) certainly did not help him gain positive recognition. It seems, in fact, that Poe was often his own worst enemy.

Poor Poe suffered a great deal of personal tragedy. Silverman's account is probably the best current critical bio around.

I bought this book primarily to find out Silverman's take on Poe's being found (just before his death) in clothes that did not belong to him (as indicated in a video in the Great Authors series). That odd fact, combined with the alter egos he created in stories like "Fall of the House of Usher" made me wonder if Poe had some sort of alter ego himself. Though the clothing issue is not completely explained (after all, who could know with certainty?), Silverman's book does offer insights into Poe's use of false identity, pseudonym, anonymous writing, plagiarism, and other identity issues (especially relating to his odd perversions of the Allan name and his brother's name). In addition, Poe's behavior, as explained by Silverman, put me in mind of a book entitled *I Hate You, Don't Leave Me: Understanding the Borderline Personality Disorder* by Jerold J. Kreisman and Hal Straus, published in 1989. I'm an English teacher, not a psychologist, and I do not know the current thinking on borderline personality disorder, but it is apparent that virtually every characteristic Kreisman and Straus identified in the borderline personality were exhibited by Poe. The next time I teach Poe, I plan to present information from both books for my students to consider (after reading "Fall of the House of Usher," Poe's story with a cross-gender alter ego). Thanks, Professor Silverman, for a marvelously researched and documented book!

If you have enough interest in Poe to even entertain the idea of reading a biography, you should move ahead now and order a copy of this fantastic book. But you'd better have a copy of Poe's works nearby, because Silverman's book (as with all excellent literary biographies)will continually fire your yearning to revisit familiar Poe works and to discover ones you've missed. Assuming that your interest derives first from Poe's writings, you'll find Silverman's account wholly engaging. I like to thumb through it simply for Silverman's analytic synopses of Poe's poems and stories, which the author enlivens with connections between the work he's currently reviewing and earlier and later ones as well. Silverman thus offers a total panorama of Poe's interests, development, themes and aims. Indeed, the book could almost be the biography of Poe's literary accomplishment.Silverman's finely detailed yet compulsively readable account of Poe's life is equally engrossing. The book's title is the most sensationalistic thing about it, for Silverman pursues the facts and spectualtions about Poe with deep scholarly interest but objective, rational distance--and yet he relays it all with a novelist's drive. He allows the unremittingly frustrating commingling of tragedy and success in Poe's life speak for itself. Though this is a book to be read from cover to cover, you can nonethless pick it up anywhere and find yourself immediately involved. Silverman capture's Poe's person and his art with balance and intensity in his solid biography.

I loved this book. It was another instance of realizing that almost everything I knew about a topic (in this case, E.A.Poe) was inaccurate. Also, Silverman's book provided a number of insights into life in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Richmond in the pre-Civil War 19th Century. I do wish, however, that the author had more directly addressed some lingering questions about Poe; specifically, the real nature of his marriage to Virginia and his peculiar relationship to her mother, and the cause of his bouts of derangement (was it really alcohol or some other mental/chemical condition?). This was a rich and deep book that was very difficult to put down, even though it's long.