Poe. A Life Cut Short

Cover Type: Hardcover
Book Condition: Very Good
Jacket Condition: No Jacket
Publisher: CHATTO & WINDUS
Publisher Place: London
Publisher Year: 2008
Edition: First Edition

Description: 168 pages. Book is in Very good condition throughout. Peter Ackroyd Is An Award-winning Historian, Biographer, Novelist, Poet And Broadcaster. He Is The Author Of The Acclaimed Non-fiction Bestsellers London: The Biography, Thames: Sacred River And London Under; Biographies Of Figures Including Charles Dickens, William Blake, Charlie Chaplin And Alfred Hitchcock; And A Multi-volume History Of England. He Has Won The Whitbread Biography Award, The Royal Society Of Literature's William Heinemann Award, The James Tait Black Memorial Prize, The Guardian Fiction Prize, The Somerset Maugham Award And The South Bank Prize For Literature. He Holds A CBE For Services To Literature.

Publishers Description: Edgar Allan Poe served as a soldier and began his literary career composing verses modelled on Byron; soon he was trying out his prose-tales - often horror melodramas such as The Fall of the House of Usher. As editor of the Literary Messenger he was influential among critics and writers of the American South. His versatile writings - including, for example, The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Raven - continue to resonate down the centuries.Peter Ackroyds biography of Poe opens with his end, his final days - no one knows what happened between the time when friends saw him off on the steam-boat to Baltimore and his discovery six days later dying in a tavern. This mystery sets the scene for a short life packed with drama and tragedy (drink and poverty) combined with extraordinary brilliance.Poe has been claimed as the forerunner of modern fantasy, and credited with the invention of psychological dramas (long before Freud), science fiction (before H.G. Wells and Jules Verne) and the detective story (before Arthur Conan Doyle). Tennyson described him as the most original genius that America has produced. He influenced European romanticism and was the harbinger of both Symbolism and Surrealism. Peter Ackroyd, who places significance on Poes childhood (his travelling actor parents were miserably poor, his mother had TB and he was orphaned), claims that Poe found his family among writers - writers not only of his time but of the future generations who were influenced by the power of his imagination.

ISBN: 9780701169886