Edgar Allan Poe's life was a mess. But his work was in his command

To borrow a current idiom, Edgar Allan Poe was a lot. Which means, almost syllogistically, that any biography of him — even one as thoughtful and compassionate as Richard Kopley’s “Edgar Allan Poe” — has to be a lot, too. A long and not always edifying tale of success and setback, temperance and bacchanals, playing out across the Atlantic seaboard and end-stopped by a death no less tragic for being in the cards. It’s exhausting stuff, and the only reason to strap ourselves in once more is the chance to see a genius being born. A good thing it happened, too, because if anybody desperately needed to be a genius, it was Poe. Born to indigent actors and orphaned at 2 years old, he was brought into the home of John Allan, a proud Richmond merchant. From the start, Poe’s foster father called the arrangement “an experiment,” which meant that young Edgar was never formally adopted and lived in plain view of Allan’s disapproval. By the time Poe had withdrawn from the University of Virginia and ... Read full article.