Man of the Crowd - Edgar Allan Poe and the City

"We tend to think of Edgar Allan Poe as a loner, living in a world of his own imagination and detached from his physical environment. Poe might seem like a Nowhere Man, but of course he was always somewhere - just not at the same address for very long. The Man of the Crowd chronicles Poe's rootless life, focusing on the American cities where he lived the longest: Richmond, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. The Poe who emerges in The Man of the Crowd is a man whose outlook and career were shaped by his physical environments - mostly urban and almost entirely American. His career was tied closely to the rise of American magazines, so he lived in the cities that produced them and wrote not just stories and poems but journalism and editorials with an urban magazine-reading public in mind. For years he witnessed urban slavery up close, living and working within a few blocks of slave jails and auction houses in Richmond. In Philadelphia, he saw an orderly, expanding city struggling to contain its own violent propensities. And at a time when suburbs were just beginning to offer an alternative to crowded city dwellings, Poe tried living cheaply on the then-rural Upper West Side of Manhattan and, later, in what is now the Bronx. Though Poe rarely provided "local color" in his fiction, his urban mysteries and claustrophobic tales of troubled minds and abused bodies reflect his experience living among soldiers, slaves, and immigrants"--

About the author

Scott Peeples is professor of English at the College of Charleston. His books include The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe and Edgar Allan Poe Revisited. Michelle Van Parys is professor of photography at the College of Charleston. Her books include The Way Out West: Desert Landscapes. Peeples and Van Parys both live in Charleston, South Carolina.

Summary

How four American cities shaped Poe's life and writingsEdgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) changed residences about once a year throughout his life. Driven by a desire for literary success and the pressures of supporting his family, Poe sought work in American magazines, living in the cities that produced them. Scott Peeples chronicles Poe's rootless l

Product details

• Authors: Scott Peeples, Peeples Scott
• Assisted by: Michelle Van Parys (Photographs)
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 25.04.2023
• EAN: 9780691247960
• ISBN: 978-0-691-24796-0
• No. of pages: 224
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary Figures, Biography: literary, LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry, HISTORY / Social History, Social & cultural history, LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General, LITERARY CRITICISM / Mystery & Detective, Literary studies: poetry & poets, Poetry by individual poets, Literature: history & criticism, United States of America, USA, Literary studies: general, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Biography: writers, Literature: history and criticism, Literary studies: poetry and poets