Michael DirdaIs-Poe the most influential American writer? A new book offers evidence.
There are many, many biographies of Edgar Allan Poe, the most exhaustive being Arthur Hobson Quinn’s, first published in 1941, the most concise Peter Ackroyd’s 2009 “Poe: A Life Cut Short.” Nearly all of them, however, are written by literary scholars, poets or novelists. By contrast, John Tresch’s “The Reason for the Darkness of the Night” situates our nation’s most influential writer, as I would claim Poe to be, against the...