Published by Vintage, part of Vintage Publishing
Format: Paperback
£8.99
Author:
Peter Ackroyd
Format: Paperback
EAN: 9780099287674
£8.99
Available for dispatch within 1-2 working days
EAN: 9780099287674
Published: 5 Feb 2009
Heralded as a genius, the forerunner of modern fantasy and credited with the invention of the psychological drama, science fiction and the detective story , Edgar Allan Poe had a life as dramatic and tragic as his art.
Poe's life was dominated by dying women; his mother died of consumption when he was only two, his stepmother when he was twenty, and his wife, Virginia, died of the same disease and at the same age as his mother. As Ackroyd brilliantly shows, it was these deaths, together with his miserable childhood, that led to such dark and dazzling tales as 'The Fall of the House of Usher' and 'Berenice', although it was wiht the publication of 'The Raven' that the writer finally ahcieved the recognition of which he dreamed. Success couldn't save him from himself, however, and he was dead by the age of forty, his final days as mysterious as much of his writing.
Poe was an extraordinary writer and in Peter Ackroyd, he has found his perfect biographer.
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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
With an adept ventriloquism, Ackroyd weaves together contemporary testimony and his own crisp narrative... His own elegant, even terse, prose mirrors his subject's best, whilst it is also shot through with Poe's anguish
- Scotsman
Ackroyd is clearly fascinated by his subject. He makes the reader want to re-read Poe, and indeed to read more of Ackroyd on Poe
- Scotland on Sunday
Ackroyd is more like a literary spiritualist who summons up the voices of the dead and encourages them to possess his writing... It is as short and sharp as a flick-knife
- Daily Telegraph
Ackroyd is clearly fascinated by his subject. He makes the reader want to re-read Poe, and indeed to read more of Ackroyd on Poe
- Scotland on Sunday
Poe's brilliant, erratic, abbreviated career stands to gain rather than lose from the form of brief life patented by Ackroyd. A short biography is not a long one shrunk. Instead of patiently accumulated details, emotional complexity and architectural shaping, it operates by lightening strikes, atmospheric colouring, impressionistic techniques of concision and suggestion
- Observer
200 pages of beautifully concentrated and cadenced prose
- Glasgow Herald
Ackroyd tells his story straight, without moralising
- Literary Review
Mr Ackroyd's biography of a writer who dies at the age of 40 after an alcoholic bender is almost as vivid and flawed as Poe himself ... Mr Ackroyd is especially good at conveying Poe's precarious state
- Economist
With an adept ventriloquism Ackroyd weaves together contemporary testimony with his own crisp narrative...a vivid recreation of the life and sensibility that lay behind the work
- Evening Standard
Such a Hammer horror biography - a veritable car-crash of a life - is tailor-made for a writer such as Ackroyd. He sustains its intensity in these 160 pages
- Sunday Telegraph
Peter Ackroyd has written acclaimed biographies of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Charles Dickens, William Blake, Shakespeare and Thomas More, as well as short books about Chaucer, J.M.W. Turner, Isaac Newton and most recently, Edgar Allen Poe. A bestselling biographer, historian, novelist and broadcaster, he holds a CBE for services to literature. He is the author of London: The Biography and Thames: Sacred River, and lives in London.
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