A MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES | Kirkus Reviews

A new life of the enigmatic writer.

TV and film critic Dawidziak draws on published and archival sources, including more than 50 interviews with Edgar Allan Poe scholars and other experts, to create a colorful portrait of the poet, critic, and story writer. The author structures his biography as parallel timelines, interweaving a chronology of significant periods in Poe’s life with a close investigation of the mystery of his sudden death. Seeing his subject as “a creature of contradiction, duality, and ambiguity,” Dawidziak examines the myths that swirl around Poe’s career, reputation, and relationships. Orphaned as a young child, he was adopted by the “aloof and exacting” John Allan and his benevolent wife, Fanny, whose frequent illnesses made her inaccessible to her young ward. Although the couple provided a home, Edgar never felt truly loved; after Fanny’s death in 1829, his relationship with Allan grew increasingly contentious. At 17, Poe enrolled at the University of Virginia, where a classmate found him to be “very excitable & restless, at times wayward, melancholic & morose, but again—in his better moods frolicksome, full of fun & a most attractive and agreeable companion.” He soon left college life for a stint at West Point, where his waywardness again got the better of him. A devotee of Lord Byron, Poe saw himself as a romantic, “separated from the masses not by class but by intellect, sensitivity, and genius. Yet, at the same time,” Dawidziak writes, “he craves a place in the august circles where he is granted admittance but never full acceptance.” He also craved love, which he found from his devoted aunt, Maria Clemm, and her daughter, Virginia, whom Poe married in 1836, when she was 13. Offering a sympathetic, if not revisionist, portrait, Dawidziak does rule out several theories about Poe’s death—rabies, carbon monoxide poisoning, a drug overdose, epilepsy, apoplexy, and liver disease, to name a few—to defend a well-grounded conclusion.

A brisk, satisfying biography of a literary icon who still fascinates.