Poe : A Life Cut Short

ISBN-13: 9780099287674 / Angielski / Miękka / 2009 / 192 str.

Peter Ackroyd

Opis

Edgar Allan Poe's life (1809--1849) was gothic, mysterious, theatrical and fatally flawed -- in short, an ideal subject for one of Peter Ackroyd's brilliantly concise, dramatic and immensely readable biographies.
Edgar Allan Poe has been claimed as the forerunner of modern fantasy, and credited with the invention of psychological dramas (long before Freud), science fiction (before H.G. Wells and Jules Verne), and the detective story (before Arthur Conan Doyle), as well as influencing European Symbolism and Surrealism.
Peter Ackroyd's biography of Poe opens with his end, his final days -- no one knows what happened between the time when friends saw him off on the steamboat to Baltimore and his discovery six days later dying in a tavern. This mystery sets the scene for a short life packed with drama and tragedy (drink and poverty) combined with extraordinary brilliance. Ultimately, Peter Ackroyd claims, Poe found his family among writers, not only those of his time but also those of future generations who were influenced by the power of his imagination.

Recenzje

Poe is an ideal biographical subject for Peter Ackroyd... Admirably captures the heady mix of the esoteric, grotesque and thoroughly modern in Poe Sunday Times

O autorze

Peter Ackroyd is an award-winning historian, biographer, novelist, poet and broadcaster. He is the author of the acclaimed non-fiction bestsellers London: The Biography, Thames: Sacred River and London Under; biographies of figures including Charles Dickens, William Blake, Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock; and a multi-volume history of England. He has won the Whitbread Biography Award, the Royal Society of Literature's William Heinemann Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award and the South Bank Prize for Literature. He holds a CBE for services to literature.