My favorite author at the is Edgar Allan Poe?

Question

what is the best biography that I can get out there? Is there one that really stands out for information and understand of this author? I want to do a more complete study of the man and his life.

Answer 1

I've read this one - in my opinion, it's the best available:

Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (Paperback)
by Arthur Hobson Quinn

Review
"Without warning, without any preliminary fanfare of trumpets, a book has now appeared that towers above others of its kind, a book in which resourceful scholarship and a lucid gift of expression are happily joined. I wish I could recapture all I have recklessly said in praise of other books and concentrate it here." -- Books



Book Description
Renowned as the creator of the detective story and a master of horror, the author of "The Red Mask of Death," "The Black Cat," and "The Murders of the Rue Morgue," Edgar Allan Poe seems to have derived his success from suffering and to have suffered from his success. "The Raven" and "The Tell-Tale Heart" have been read as signs of his personal obsessions, and "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Descent into the Maelstrom" as symptoms of his own mental collapse. Biographers have seldom resisted the opportunities to confuse the pathologies in the stories with the events in Poe's life. Against this tide of fancy, guesses, and amateur psychologizing, Arthur Hobson Quinn's biography devotes itself meticulously to facts. Based on exhaustive research in the Poe family archive, Quinn extracts the life from the legend, and describes how they both were distorted by prior biographies."

Here's one review from the amazon site:

"As a lifelong fan of Edgar Allan Poe, I admit that I worship at the altar of Poe. Therefore it was a delight to discover this most excellent bio, extensively researched by another worshipful fan (from an earlier era) of American's greatest short story writer. This is a must for your reference library. I read and absorbed every single page. I'm grateful that the author followed his own lifelong passion for Poe and went against the grain of Poe bashing biographers of his time, and produced this work that extols Poe's positive character features while not neglecting the negatives. Compare this bio with other "negative" Poe bios of the past (esp. early 20th century), still available in libraries, and you'll understand why it was such a pleasure for me to find this particular book which provides a more balanced picture of the artist's life and career."

I think you'd enjoy it a lot - I know I did.

Answer 2

Murder in the Rue Morgue and The Tell-Tale Heart. I did a paper on the latter, showing how Poe may have been schizophrenic, since the the man in the The Tell-Tale Heart exhibits all the symptoms of Schrizophrenia years before there was such a thing. Got an A on that one!!

Answer 3

i dont have any links but feel free to type in
edgar allan poe
edgar allan poe timeline
edgar allan poe biography

anything like that will work