Edgar Allan Poe. The Reasons for the Night's Darkness

For several decades now, Edgar Allan Poe has remained one of the most popular American writers. He gained love and recognition worldwide for his innovative detective fiction, horror stories, and memorable, atmospheric poetry. But what if the man who wrote "The Raven" and "The Fall of the House of Usher" had another side? In "The Reasons for the Night's Darkness," John Tresch offers a bold new biography of a writer whose short, tortured life continues to stir up and provoke burning interest. Shedding light on an era when the boundaries between entertainment, speculation, and scientific inquiry were blurred, Tresch reveals Poe's obsession with science and his desire to advance and question human knowledge. Poe was a passionate and often combative commentator on new discoveries, publishing and speaking on literary stages where the era's most outstanding scientists and pseudo-intellectual frauds also performed. Tresch shows that Poe lived, thought, and suffered in a world of science, and many of his most famous creative works are best viewed through its lens. Pursuing extraordinary guesses and a unique aesthetic vision, Poe remained a figure of explosive contradiction: he happily unveiled the mystifications of the era's scientific frauds, even as he himself masterfully committed them in his novels.