Fallen Angel: The Life of Edgar Allan Poe

by Robert Morgan

Overview

Over 170 years after his death, Edgar Allan Poe remains a figure of enduring fascination and speculation for readers, scholars, and devotees of the weird and macabre. In Fallen Angel, acclaimed novelist and poet Robert Morgan offers a new biography of this gifted, complicated author.

Focusing on Poe’s personal relationships, Morgan chronicles how several women influenced his life and art. Eliza Poe, his mother, died before he turned three, but she haunted him ever after. The loss of Elmira Royster Shelton, his first and last love, devastated him and inspired much of his poetry. Morgan shows that Poe, known for his gothic and supernatural writing, was also a poet of the natural world who helped invent the detective story, science fiction, analytical criticism, and symbolist aesthetics. Though he died at age forty, Poe left behind works of great originality and vision that Fallen Angel explores with depth and feeling.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807181065
Publisher:	Louisiana State University Press
Publication date:	11/15/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	397
Sales rank:	923,568
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Robert Morgan has published more than twenty-five books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including the bestselling Boone: A Biography. His novel Gap Creek was a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book, and an Oprah’s Book Club selection. He is the Kappa Alpha Professor of English Emeritus at Cornell University.

Editorial Reviews

As a poet and novelist, Robert Morgan deftly explains the subtle, subliminal effects of Poe’s texts, and he counters the gloomy emphasis of many earlier biographies by underscoring the author’s courage in the face of recurrent adversity.

J. Gerald Kennedy

Combining, with a light touch, shrewd psychological analysis and literary appreciation, highlighting Poe’s journalistic career and the interest of many lesser-known writings, this masterful exploration of the ways in which the incidents of Poe’s life inform his work has much to engage and delight any fan of Poe.

Jonathan Culler

Morgan does what literary biography ought always to do, mixing a facility for humane storytelling with sound scholarly analysis. He captures Poe’s haunted world, where what is strange is beautiful and what is beautiful is strange.

Andrew Burstein

Morgan masterfully weaves together the threads of Poe’s life, literature, and legacy while uncovering the love-starved romantic too often hidden behind his popular image as a horror master.

Christopher P. Semtner

11/01/2023

It has been almost 10 years since a major study of Poe appeared and 30 years since a full-scale biography was published. This new assessment of Poe is long overdue. Morgan (emeritus, English, Cornell Univ.; Boone: A Biography) has written fiction and poetry in addition to scholarly works. He puts these diverse skills to good use in his exploration of Poe's life and writings. The main themes are Poe's obsessions with matrimony and the deaths of young, beautiful women and his endless search for maternal support. Morgan also delves into Poe's love of nature and landscapes, his study of aesthetics, and how his dramatic personal life often overshadowed his prolific writings. He discusses Poe's love affairs; his frequent descents into alcohol addiction, illness, and depression; and business failures. Additionally, Morgan offers cogent assessments of his major works. Poe's death in 1849, at age 38, remains a mystery, and Morgan skillfully dissects the many accounts and theories and speculates that he died of tubercular meningitis. Finally, he assesses the conflicting accounts of Poe's life in earlier biographies and admits that there is still much that will never be known. VERDICT This biography will renew an interest in Poe's life and writings and is an excellent addition to the vast collection of Poe scholarship.—Thomas Karel

Library Journal