Many of Poe's admirers became influential innovators. From his blueprints they built the modern genres of detective fiction (Arthur Conan Doyle), science fiction (Jules Verne) and horror, particularly of a weird and psychological cast (Robert Louis Stevenson, H.P. Lovecraft, and eventually Stephen King). While these advances in genre fiction have had a remarkable long-lasting popular success, for a long time they were not treated as "high literature" worthy of serious critical attention.
In antebellum America the institutional markers separating professional scientists from amateurs or cranks were just beginning to take shape, and Poe made the most of this ambiguity to put forward his own analyses in aeronautics, conchology and psychology and put his stamp on cryptology, information theory, and cosmology. With these neglected achievements we might be inclined to add him to the pantheon of contrbutors to what his contemporary David Brewster called the "one vast miracle" of modern science.
--John Tresch, The Reason for the Darkness of the Night (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2021)
This is a fascinating book that interweaves the life of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) with the science and scientists of the first half of the 19th century, as well as the worlds of journalism and publishing. Most of the names, lives and achievements of the people Poe knew and sparred with were unfamiliar to me -- George Combe. Samuel Morton, Alexander Dallas Bache -- while other important figures of the time -- Daguerre. Mesmer -- I have heard of but knew little about. I have read most of Poe's stories and poems as well as the marvelous novella The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym of Nantucket, but I was unaware of Poe's involvement with the scientific issues of the day and his journalistic exposures of the frauds and humbug of his time, all analyzed and documented in Tresch's book, as he follows Poe and his writing from Virginia to West Point, Boston, New York and Baltimore.
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