6/24/2023 0 Comments Poe a life cut short![]() On Thursday, 27 September 1849, Poe was to have boarded a steamer in Richmond, Virginia, bound for New York by way of Baltimore. As Ackroyd writes, ‘like his narratives and fables, Poe’s own story ends abruptly and inconclusively it is bedevilled by a mystery that has never been, and probably can never be, resolved.’ It is a span of six days that has baffled first Poe’s family and friends, and then his biographers, since his death in 1849 at the age of 40. Never mind that Paul Strathern’s recent biographical study, Poe in 90 Minutes, and a new novel by Matthew Pearl, The Poe Shadow, made the same opening gambit. So, it is little surprise to find the prolific genre-bender Peter Ackroyd beginning his brief biography of Edgar Allan Poe with a recounting of his subject’s final days. ![]() ![]() ![]() Why not borrow the sure-fire novelistic tricks of flashback and flash-forward to elude that soporific ‘and then’? Chronology is both a gift and a curse, offering an attractively simple narrative structure but risking the tedium of ever-forward motion. These days it’s a rare biography that opens with a recital of its subject’s pedigree, then works its way methodically from cradle to grave. Where to begin? It’s the biographer’s fundamental dilemma. ![]()
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