Peter Ackroyd - Poe. A Life Cut Short [2008][A]

Gothic, mysterious, theatrical, fatally flawed, and dazzling, the life of Edgar Allan Poe, one of America’s greatest and most versatile writers, is the ideal subject for Peter Ackroyd. Poe wrote lyrical poetry and macabre psychological melodramas; invented the first fictional detective; and produced pioneering works of science fiction and fantasy. His innovative style, images, and themes had a tremendous impact on European romanticism, symbolism, and surrealism, and continue to influence writers today.
In this essential addition to his canon of acclaimed biographies, Peter Ackroyd explores Poe’s literary accomplishments and legacy against the background of his erratic, dramatic, and sometimes sordid life. Ackroyd chronicles Poe’s difficult childhood, his bumpy academic and military careers, and his complex relationships with women, including his marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin. He describes Poe’s much-written-about problems with gambling and alcohol with sympathy and insight, showing their connections to Poe’s childhood and the trials, as well as the triumphs, of his adult life. Ackroyd’s thoughtful, perceptive examinations of some of Poe’s most famous works shed new light on these classics and on the troubled and brilliant genius who created them.

Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Noted author Ackroyd (The Thames) adds to his one-man Brief Lives series this exploration of the short—and predominantly miserable—life of Edgar Allan Poe. Bringing his novelist's skills to bear, Ackroyd opens with Poe's mysterious death in 1849: Like his narratives and his fables, Poe's own story ends abruptly and inconclusively.... Born in Boston in 1809 to traveling actors and orphaned in 1811, Poe was adopted by Richmond, Va., merchant John Allan. Their relationship soured, and Poe left for a rocky academic career at the University of Virginia and a stint at West Point, and in 1836 he married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia. Despite critical acclaim for his work—from 1839's The Fall of the House of Usher to his famous 1845 poem, The Raven—Poe constantly struggled with alcoholism and poverty, alienating almost everyone he met. At age 40, Poe was discovered dying in a Baltimore tavern; his whereabouts for the previous week remain unknown. But Ackroyd never demonizes the melancholic man who influenced writers as diverse as Jules Verne and James Joyce, and his readable account should appeal to Poe devotees and newcomers alike. Illus. (Jan. 20)
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From Booklist
The fourth Brief Lives volume written by Ackroyd focuses on a man as famous for his personality as his works. As Ackroyd immediately remarks, Poe is the quintessential poete maudit, or accursed artist, greatly talented but thwarted by circumstances at every turn. Portraying Poe as permanently affected by his mother’s ignominious, youthful death, Ackroyd projects from Poe’s mother fixation his affectional preferences for ill young women such as his wife (and cousin) Virginia Clemm or, when such were unavailable, motherly (but not matronly) aesthetes; meanwhile, dying and dead young beauties haunt his stories and poems. Raised in England and Virginia as something of a charity case, Poe was acutely aware of his gifts, which included unforgettable looks, and, morbidly defensive of them, made for an erratic character, alternately efficient and perspicacious, charming and brilliant in conversation, and vindictive and bizarre in behavior—the last especially when he was drunk, as he lamentably often was; in short, definitely attractive-repulsive and ingratiating-infuriating. Though a bit breezy, this is a fine place to begin celebrating the 2009 Poe bicentennial. --Ray Olson

Reviews
“Ackroyd is like a literary spiritualist who summons up the voices of the dead and encourages them to possess his writing…. [Poe] is as short and sharp as a flick-knife.”–Daily Telegraph

“Ackroyd reveals a man ahead of his time, an extraordinary genius…"–Daily Express

“[a] deft, lively summary”–The Spectator

“Ackroyd…makes the reader want to re-read Poe, and indeed to read more of Ackroyd on Poe.”–Scotland on Sunday

“Poe’s brilliant, erratic, abbreviated career stands to gain rather than lose from the form of brief life patented by Ackroyd. A short biography is not a long one shrunk. Instead of patiently accumulated details, emotional complexity and architectural shaping, it operates by lightening strikes, atmospheric colouring, impressionistic techniques of concision and suggestion.”–Observer

“With an adept ventriloquism Ackroyd weaves together contemporary testimony with his own crisp narrative…a vivid recreation of the life and sensibility that lay behind the work.”–Evening Standard

“A dark subject, but a light read”–Waterstone’s Books Quarterly

“admirably captures the heady mix of the esoteric, grotesque and thoroughly modern in Poe.”–Sunday Times

“Peter Ackroyd is the Micky Spillane of English letters; scarcely a morning goes by without a brilliant new novel, history or biography popgunning out into the shops from his uber-fecund pen… his standards are high and his imagination and erudition greater than most other shopfillers…. informative, still atmospheric, and from time to time clearly the work of a very fine writer”
–Word

“Such a Hammer horror biography–a veritable car-crash of a life–is tailor-made for a writer such as Ackroyd. He sustains its intensity in these 160 pages”
–Sunday Telegraph

“an apt biographer for Poe”–The Irish Times

“informative and well-written”–The Herald

“succinct and elegant … illuminating”–Times Literary Supplement

“[Poe] recounts Poe's tumultuous and peripatetic personal and professional life in a tone equal parts crisp and Gothic.”-Los Angeles Times

“Often insightful, sometimes stunning.'-Kirkus Reviews

About the Author
PETER ACKROYD is the biographer of William Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, Dickens, Blake, and Thomas More, and the author of the bestselling London: The Biography. The subject of his previous Brief Life was Isaac Newton. He has won the Whitbread Biography Award, the Royal Society of Literature’s William Heinemann Award (jointly) and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and is the holder of a CBE for services to literature. He is the author of Thames: The Biography. His novels include The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), Hawksmoor (Guardian Fiction Prize), Chatterton (short-listed for the Booker Prize) and most recently The Fall of Troy. He lives in London.