Poe biography prompts a newfound respect
“In my younger and more vulnerable years” are the words with which narrator Nick Carraway kicks off “The Great Gatsby.” Those seven words entranced me when I first read “Gatsby,” living then in my own younger and vulnerable days as a 20-something whose heroes were writers, most of them American, most of them male. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe: that was my triumvirate, with dozens of other novelists and poets sitting just below the salt at the same table.
Then life happened — marriage, children, the need to provide for others and even a knock at the door from that Being of All Being — and my perspectives on my heroes matured. Nearly all of the writers I had venerated lost their haloes. Their work had shaped me in all sorts of ways, for which I was grateful, and I continued to honor their printed words, but the more I learned about their personal lives, the more my respect for them as role models for living diminished.
Edgar Allan Poe was one of the minor luminaries in my pantheon of scribblers. As a teenager, I’d gone through a brief but intense stage of reading his stories, like “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Gold Bug,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.” A few years later, the enthusiasm of an in-law enamored with his poetry brought me back to works like “The Raven,” “Lenore,” and “Annabel Lee.”
Even at the height of my infatuation with writers’ lives, however, Poe himself held no attraction for me. His work was clearly brilliant — he was, after all, instrumental in inventing the detective story — but I wouldn’t want him over to the house for supper. From the little I knew of his story, he was a walking wreck of a man, a drunk, bankrupt, a writer whose quarrelsome nature meant being canned from employment, one of those “tragic artists” who leave behind chaos, mess and destruction in every port they visit.
In his new biography of the man and his work, “Edgar Allan Poe: The Master of the Macabre” (Adams Media, 2025, 240 pages), Levi Lionel Leland’s lively and informative approach to Poe has softened my previous judgement of this American icon.
Part of the publisher’s series, Pocket Portraits, which so far has included writers Jane Austen, Agatha Christie, and J.R.R. Tolkien, “Edgar Allan Poe” is a small, squarish book adorned with a beautiful, strong jacket. Inside, we discover a sort of scrapbook approach: excerpts from Poe’s literary works, letters, and even examples of his cryptography; sidebars with headings like “The More You Know” and “Literary Connections” that takes readers on side excursions into Poe’s life and times; and gracefully decorated pages, all driven by Leland’s insightful critiques and crisp writing.
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In the two chapters devoted to Poe’s marriage to his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia, for instance, Lionel devotes a separate page to part of a letter Poe wrote to his aunt, Maria Clemm, Virginia’s mother. She had written Poe to report that she was considering, for reasons of poverty, housing her daughter with one of Poe’s cousins, who would assist with her education. In his reply, the jealous 26-year-old Poe wrote of his love for Virginia: “My bitterest enemy would pity me could he now read my heart.” As Lionel then tells us, “a marriage license was issued to Poe and Virginia a month later.” That license listed Virginia’s age as 21. In a sidebar, Lionel notes that “some scholars believe that Poe was waited until she was at least sixteen before consummating the marriage, if it was ever consummated at all.”
This collage of facts, details, speculations and asides along with the artistry of the book itself make for a delightful tour of this poet’s life.
This same excursion takes us into the culture and society of Poe’s time. All too often we read some sketchy account of a figure from the past without reference to his own present. Poe lived in an age when there was no safety net for the impoverished, when rampant alcoholism was only beginning to be addressed by temperance movements — Poe himself belonged for a time to one of these — when powerful medicinal drugs were often readily available without prescriptions, and when, owing to the lack of antibiotics and modern medical treatments, death was a frequent visitor to hearth and home.
Poverty, drugs, alcohol and those abrupt interruptions of the Grim Reaper were all familiar to Poe. When he was an infant, for example, his father, a traveling actor, deserted the family, and at age two Poe lost his mother, also a performer, to death from tuberculosis. Later, his wife Virginia would die at age 24 from the same affliction.
These hammer blows of death, and his constant battle with impoverishment in the precarious professions of journalism and writing, help explain both the author and the man.
Here’s two thumbs up for Levi Leland’s “Edgar Allan Poe.”
(Jeff Minick reviews books and has written four of his own: two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust On Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning As I Go” and “Movies Make the Man.” This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
