A Dream Within A Dream: The Life of Edgar Allan Poe

Nigel Barnes

As a distinguished line of devotees and detractors would attest, Edgar Allan Poe’s
work has always been a force to be reckoned with, and his influence still casts
long shadows through the literary imagination. Charles Baudelaire’s legendary
enthusiasm for Poe filled him with a desire to become his ‘heir in all things’, and his definitive translations brought Poe fame and critical acclaim in France long before he was read seriously in America. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle claimed that ‘each of Poe’s stories is a root from which a whole literature has developed . . . Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?’ H.G. Wells and Jules Verne have both tipped their hats in his direction.

But Poe was best known in his day as a trenchant and often irascible critic, a sort of guerrilla presence on the American cultural landscape, whose writings sparked
literary wars that kept him on the run from professional skirmishes, poverty and slander. Accounts of Poe’s turbulent personal life and career, his mysterious death and posthumous literary reputation have been perpetually animated and coloured by the same dark, uncanny and undeniably magnetic forces that riddle his work.

Poe’s life-long habit of correspondence with friends and family, detractors and
critics, has been collected and published previously in a two-volume academic
edition. But Nigel Barnes’s new biography is the first to incorporate a
generous selection of the letters in such a way that they tell much of his story and help illuminate the shadowy corners of Poe’s life that have hitherto been shrouded in mystery and legend