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The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science
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About The Reason For The Darkness Of The Night: Edgar
Product Description One of The Christian Science Monitor's ten best books of JuneAn innovative biography of Edgar Allan Poe―highlighting his fascination and feuds with science.Decade after decade, Edgar Allan Poe remains one of the most popular American writers. He is beloved around the world for his pioneering detective fiction, tales of horror, and haunting, atmospheric verse. But what if there was another side to the man who wrote “The Raven” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”?In The Reason for the Darkness of the Night, John Tresch offers a bold new biography of a writer whose short, tortured life continues to fascinate. Shining a spotlight on an era when the lines separating entertainment, speculation, and scientific inquiry were blurred, Tresch reveals Poe’s obsession with science and lifelong ambition to advance and question human knowledge. Even as he composed dazzling works of fiction, he remained an avid and often combative commentator on new discoveries, publishing and hustling in literary scenes that also hosted the era’s most prominent scientists, semi-scientists, and pseudo-intellectual rogues. As one newspaper put it, “Mr. Poe is not merely a man of science―not merely a poet―not merely a man of letters. He is all combined; and perhaps he is something more.”Taking us through his early training in mathematics and engineering at West Point and the tumultuous years that followed, Tresch shows that Poe lived, thought, and suffered surrounded by science―and that many of his most renowned and imaginative works can best be understood in its company. He cast doubt on perceived certainties even as he hungered for knowledge, and at the end of his life delivered a mind-bending lecture on the origins of the universe that would win the admiration of twentieth-century physicists. Pursuing extraordinary conjectures and a unique aesthetic vision, he remained a figure of explosive contradiction: he gleefully exposed the hoaxes of the era’s scientific fraudsters even as he perpetrated hoaxes himself. Tracing Poe’s hard and brilliant journey, The Reason for the Darkness of the Night is an essential new portrait of a writer whose life is synonymous with mystery and imagination―and an entertaining, erudite tour of the world of American science just as it was beginning to come into its own. Review "A splendid new biography . . . Poe’s manic omnivory, his intellectual passions and professional struggles, is the heart of the book . . . Weaving private letters and published works into a broader history, Tresch uses Poe as a drunken Virgil, through whose hazy eyes we catch glimpses of abolitionism and the Mexican-American War, new technologies and the Second Great Awakening." ―Henry M. Cowles, Los Angeles Review of Books"Tresch’s approach manages to open up the world of Poe’s writing in an unexpectedly fascinating way. What emerges is how Poe’s interest in―and sometimes misunderstanding of―science drove some of his greatest works of horror." ―Colin Dickey, The New Republic"Ingenious . . . a rich assemblage of biographical vignettes, brief story analyses and mini-essays on the era’s scientific beliefs." ―Michael Dirda, The Washington Post"Superb . . . John Tresch’s astonishing book also makes Poe exemplary rather than exceptional . . . It is Tresch’s great accomplishment to have given us our fullest contextualization of Poe’s technoaesthetics, its deep roots in the science of his day." ―Jonathan Elmer, Public Books"Tresch has produced a steady, clever, engaging literary biography that provides an excellent survey of an overlooked aspect of Poe’s writing." ―Bob Blaisdell, The Christian Science Monitor"Richly engaging... [Tresch] succeeds in placing Poe’s life story and the development of his art in the context of the maturation of science... a moving, insightful biography." ―Robert J. Scholnick, Poe Studies"Tresch draws alluring connections between Poe’s cosmological vision and his fiction, noting the “staggering unity of purpose” t
