Marginalia

by Edgar Allan Poe

The first edition of this book to reprint all seventeen installments exactly as he published them; taken from the magazines in which it appeared, this first complete and correct edition reveals an hitherto unknown side of Poe. Clean, unmarked and tight in a Brodart jacket cover.

Genres: Nonfiction, Classics

235 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1836

About the author

The name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, and The Fall of the House of Usher. This versatile writer’s oeuvre includes short stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a book of scientific theory, and hundreds of essays and book reviews. He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the science fiction genre, but he made his living as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. Poe’s reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry.

Just as the bizarre characters in Poe’s stories have captured the public imagination so too has Poe himself. He is seen as a morbid, mysterious figure lurking in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or crumbling castles. This is the Poe of legend. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame the author’s name.

The real Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston on January 19, 1809. Edgar was the second of three children. His other brother William Henry Leonard Poe would also become a poet before his early death, and Poe’s sister Rosalie Poe would grow up to teach penmanship at a Richmond girls’ school. Within three years of Poe’s birth both of his parents had died, and he was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia while Poe’s siblings went to live with other families. Mr. Allan would rear Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe had dreams of being a writer in emulation of his childhood hero the British poet Lord Byron. Early poetic verses found written in a young Poe’s handwriting on the backs of Allan’s ledger sheets reveal how little interest Poe had in the tobacco business.

For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_al...

Reviews

[teresa cerullo]

La lettura di Marginalia è stata sicuramente una lettura interessante, che mi ha fornito curiosi spunti di riflessioni su vari ambiti della letteratura (dalla capacità di esprimere tutto attraverso il linguaggio, fino a una possibile definizione di “Arte”, da quali siano le caratteristiche del genio al plagio causato dalla reminiscenza poetica). Tuttavia, ho personalmente trovato difficile seguire le riflessioni di Poe nei momenti in cui si riferisce ad autori di cui non ho grandi conoscenze.