The Reason for the Darkness of the Night
Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science
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4.6 • 5 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize | Finalist for the 2022 Edgar Award
Winner of the 2021 Quinn Award
An innovative biography of Edgar Allan Poe—highlighting his fascination and feuds with science.
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. Even as he composed dazzling works of fiction, 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. As one newspaper put it, “Mr. Poe is not merely a man of science—not merely a poet—not merely a man of letters. He is all combined; and perhaps he is something more.”
Taking us through his early training in mathematics and engineering at West Point and the tumultuous years that followed, 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. He cast doubt on perceived certainties even as he hungered for knowledge, and at the end of his life delivered a mind-bending lecture on the origins of the universe that would win the admiration of twentieth-century physicists. 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.
Tracing Poe’s hard and brilliant journey, The Reason for the Darkness of the Night is an essential new portrait of a writer whose life is synonymous with mystery and imagination—and an entertaining, erudite tour of the world of American science just as it was beginning to come into its own.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Tresch (The Romantic Machine) sheds light on Edgar Allan Poe's engagement with science in this intriguing biography. In 1838, Tresch writes, Poe arrived in Philadelphia, "the nation's most active center for scientific research," and his immersion in the conversations among journalists, scientists, and artists who were discussing prominent scientific concerns, such as the tension "between hardheaded empiricism and controversial speculation" informed many of his best-known works. Tresch carefully reads Poe's poems, stories, and essays, illustrating the ways that Poe balanced the literary with the scientific. "The Fall of the House of Usher," for example, combined elements from gothic and fantastic tales with imagery from alchemy, and featured "the ethers, atmospheres, and energies of experimental science." "The Purloined Letter," meanwhile, sees Poe critiquing empirical and mathematical sciences: they were narrow, he argued, because they left no room for awe. While Tresch addresses the common impression of Poe as a "morbid dreamer" and a penniless writer, he takes things further by offering a nimble account of the emerging science of Poe's day. Fans of Poe's work—and science enthusiasts—will appreciate Tresch's fresh angle.
