The Reason for the Darkness of the Night

Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science

By: John Tresch

Narrated by: Paul Woodson

Length: 14 hrs and 12 mins

Publisher's summary

Decade after decade, Edgar Allan Poe remains one of the most popular American writers. He is beloved around the world for his pioneering detective fiction, tales of horror, and haunting, atmospheric verse. But what if there was another side to the man who wrote The Raven and The Fall of the House of Usher?

In The Reason for the Darkness of the Night, John Tresch offers a bold new biography of a writer whose short, tortured life continues to fascinate. Shining a spotlight on an era when the lines separating entertainment, speculation, and scientific inquiry were blurred, Tresch reveals Poe's obsession with science and lifelong ambition to advance and question human knowledge. He remained an avid and often combative commentator on new discoveries, publishing and hustling in literary scenes that also hosted the era's most prominent scientists, semi-scientists, and pseudo-intellectual rogues.

Tresch shows that Poe lived, thought, and suffered surrounded by science - and that many of his most renowned and imaginative works can best be understood in its company. Pursuing extraordinary conjectures and a unique aesthetic vision, he remained a figure of explosive contradiction: He gleefully exposed the hoaxes of the era's scientific fraudsters even as he perpetrated hoaxes himself.

©2021 John Tresch (P)2021 Tantor

Know the Real Poe

If you read the stories of EA Poe you are aware of his writing talent. He was an excellent poet, too, An appreciation and understanding of his many contributions occurred after he died, not fully during hs lifetime. He also had insight into the increasing number of scientific discoveries of the first-half of the 19th century, and included information about them in articles he wrote for magazines. This book provides an accurate and detailed analysis of how he tried to develop his career as an author and lecturer interweaving descriptions of his personal life. It's time to re-read all those stories.

Great stuff, except...

This is a very useful book to have if you really like Edgar Allen Poe. The only problem is, it includes some of those inaccurate appeals to "woke" sensibilities regarding "evil white men" that are expected of the time of writing.

Otherwise, it's worth the purchase.

Terrible, could not finish

Barely learned a thing about Poe, The stopped, listening in section 3. I was optimistically, hoping for so much more out of this book.