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Midnight Dreary: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe
Paperback
Literary FiguresLiterary Criticism
Publisher: Craig Gerard Ferguson
Published: Sep 2 2026
Pages: 134
Weight: 0.36
Height: 0.31 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
Two days after Edgar Allan Poe died in a Baltimore hospital in 1849, a rival editor named Rufus Griswold published an obituary calling him a friendless, godless drunk - and then spent years afterward forging letters and doctoring the record to make the lie stick. That fabrication became the official Poe for the next century, bundled into the collected works Griswold controlled as his literary executor.
Along the way, the record consistently contradicts the myth: a Sergeant Major who earned his rank; an editor who grew two magazines' circulation dramatically; a critic feared across the literary world; a man documented, again and again, as genuinely loved by the people closest to him. This is a biography that corrects the record without swinging to hagiography - Poe was difficult, often his own worst enemy, and undone as much by a broken publishing economy and a hostile executor as by anything in his own character.
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