Word: poe
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Strictly as an account of Dreiser's bitter early years, this is one of the best biographies of an American literary figure since Israfel, Hervey Allen's life of Poe. Its report of Dreiser's last years is perfunctory and its criticism of his work is so noncommittal that the reader has trouble in fathoming Author Elias' own opinion. But Dreiser's youth in the gaslit underworld of Terre Haute, his work in the rowdy newspaper and music publishing houses of the turn of the century, and above all, the gaudy entrances & exits...
...became an invalid at 19 and died at 24. Until his death at 40, Poe's life had an appalling consistency of trouble-brief periods of success followed by long years of misery, quarrels with one after another of his backers, tigerlike leaps on his fellow poets for plagiarism, mud-slinging campaigns with rival editors. He drank, and at times took opium, stopped drinking whenever his work went well. Yet in each serious battle his enemies raked up the old stories, and in these letters Poe is constantly admitting his guilt and explaining that he has reformed...
Exasperated Man. The.first letter in the book is a cool request to the governor of Virginia (written when Poe was 15) asking that the Richmond Junior Volunteers, in which he was a lieutenant, be allowed to keep their arms. It sets the tone for the book. Poe's letters were brisk and businesslike-requests for books to review, offers to sell stories, proposals to start new literary magazines, attempts to wangle copy from contributors like Longfellow, Hawthorne, or James Russell Lowell. When Poe became editor of Graham's Magazine it had 5,000 subscribers. When he left...
Intellectuals are apt to consider themselves somewhat more intelligent and sensitive than most people, and in Poe's case, the root of the trouble seems to have been that he was. He grandly offered to solve any cipher that his readers sent him. People sent him dishonest ciphers-i.e., those which a correspondent could not have readily deciphered even with the key. Poe solved them anyway. His critical essays, that seemed so ill-tempered to his contemporaries, now seem merely honest and forthright. In general, posterity has agreed with...
...each of his roles-soldier, cadet, editor, or unhappy lover-there is no escaping the apparent fact that Poe was a genius, with a mind so quick and extraordinary that, even had he not had a fierce temper and a weakness for drink, his mental superiority to the people around him would probably have made him just as miserable...