The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science

by John Tresch Narrated by Paul Woodson

Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2021-03-20
The prolific fiction writer, poet, and literary critic viewed through a scientific lens.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is synonymous with the grotesque. Tresch, professor of the history of art, science, and folk practice at the Warburg Institute, wants us to think of Poe as a scientist, as well. Tresch’s expansive biography takes the chronological road, with Poe “at the center of the maelstrom of American science in the first half of the nineteenth century.” Enamored by science as a young man, Poe wrote “Sonnet—To Science” in 1830. Arguing against other critics, who claim that the poem criticizes science, Tresch argues that Poe writes in praise of science. In fact, the sonnet “laid out a program for Poe’s life’s work.” At West Point, he studied mathematics, geometry, and astronomy, all of which “decisively shaped his career as a poet, critic, and author.” In Baltimore in 1833, Poe won a fiction contest for “MS. Found in a Bottle,” in which he balanced scientific language with catastrophic revelation. Near starvation, he was saved by a job at the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond. His stories and essays on science were warmly received, but he was soon let go. In New York, he wrote The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, a novel about the “quest for discovery and its costs.” In 1839, he secured a position at The Gentleman’s Magazine in Philadelphia, where scientific innovation was thriving. Testing “new literary formulas,” he wrote his most distinctive tales, solidified his “reputation for scientific acumen,” championed the art of photography, explored code cracking, and wrote a scientific textbook, The Conchologist’s First Book. Surprisingly, it was his only bestseller. Meanwhile, Poe’s drinking and his wife’s death were affecting his health. He hoped his ambitious new book and lecture tour on cosmology, Eureka, (a “serious mess, a glorious mess, but a mess”) would help him gain back his popularity. He died a year later. Throughout, Tresch does a fine job balancing insightful discussions of Poe’s literary works alongside his intriguing scientific pursuits.

A surprising side of Poe splendidly revealed.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940176141085
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	06/15/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

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