408 pages / 6.00 x 9.00 inches / 33 halftones
Biography / Literary Figures | Literary Criticism / American | Literary Criticism / Horror & Supernatural
Over 170 years after his death, Edgar Allan Poe remains a figure of enduring fascination and speculation for readers, scholars, and devotees of the weird and macabre. In Fallen Angel, acclaimed novelist and poet Robert Morgan offers a new biography of this gifted, complicated author.
Focusing on Poe’s personal relationships, Morgan chronicles how several women influenced his life and art. Eliza Poe, his mother, died before he turned three, but she haunted him ever after. The loss of Elmira Royster Shelton, his first and last love, devastated him and inspired much of his poetry. Morgan shows that Poe, known for his gothic and supernatural writing, was also a poet of the natural world who helped invent the detective story, science fiction, analytical criticism, and symbolist aesthetics. Though he died at age forty, Poe left behind works of great originality and vision that Fallen Angel explores with depth and feeling.
Robert Morgan has published more than twenty-five books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including the bestselling Boone: A Biography. His novel Gap Creek was a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book, and an Oprah’s Book Club selection. He is the Kappa Alpha Professor of English Emeritus at Cornell University.
“Combining, with a light touch, shrewd psychological analysis and literary appreciation, highlighting Poe’s journalistic career and the interest of many lesser-known writings, this masterful exploration of the ways in which the incidents of Poe’s life inform his work has much to engage and delight any fan of Poe.”—Jonathan Culler, author of Theory of the Lyric
“As a poet and novelist, Robert Morgan deftly explains the subtle, subliminal effects of Poe’s texts, and he counters the gloomy emphasis of many earlier biographies by underscoring the author’s courage in the face of recurrent adversity.”—J. Gerald Kennedy, author of Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing
“Morgan does what literary biography ought always to do, mixing a facility for humane storytelling with sound scholarly analysis. He captures Poe’s haunted world, where what is strange is beautiful and what is beautiful is strange.”—Andrew Burstein, author of The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving
“Morgan masterfully weaves together the threads of Poe’s life, literature, and legacy while uncovering the love-starved romantic too often hidden behind his popular image as a horror master.”—Christopher P. Semtner, curator, Edgar Allan Poe Museum, Richmond, Virginia
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