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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Feb 2023, 288 pages
Paperback:
Feb 2024, 304 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Jacob Lenz-Avila
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A Mystery of Mysteries is a brilliant biography of Edgar Allan Poe that examines the renowned author's life through the prism of his mysterious death and its many possible causes.
It is a moment shrouded in horror and mystery. Edgar Allan Poe died on October 7, 1849, at just forty, in a painful, utterly bizarre manner that would not have been out of place in one of his own tales of terror. What was the cause of his untimely death, and what happened to him during the three missing days before he was found, delirious and "in great distress" on the streets of Baltimore, wearing ill-fitting clothes that were not his own?
Mystery and horror. Poe, who remains one of the most iconic of American writers, died under haunting circumstances that reflect the two literary genres he took to new heights. Over the years, there has been a staggering amount of speculation about the cause of death, from rabies and syphilis to suicide, alcoholism, and even murder. But many of these theories are formed on the basis of the caricature we have come to associate with Poe: the gloomy-eyed grandfather of Goth, hunched over a writing desk with a raven perched on one shoulder, drunkenly scribbling his chilling masterpieces. By debunking the myths of how he lived, we come closer to understanding the real Poe―and uncovering the truth behind his mysterious death, as a new theory emerges that could prove the cause of Poe's death was haunting him all his life.
In a compelling dual-timeline narrative alternating between Poe's increasingly desperate last months and his brief but impactful life, Mark Dawidziak sheds new light on the enigmatic master of macabre.
Excerpt
A Mystery of Mysteries
Having completed just forty years of what was without question a most stormy life, Edgar Allan Poe took leave of this realm early Sunday morning, October 7, 1849. Nobody knows precisely why. Indeed, like so many aspects of his life, his death has been the topic of endless debate, conjecture, speculation, guessing, and second-guessing. Nobody can tell you with anything resembling certainty why, while traveling from Richmond to New York, he ended up in Baltimore. Nobody can tell you what happened to him during the missing days between his last sighting in Richmond on the evening of September 26 and his reappearance outside an Election Day polling place in Baltimore on the damp, chilly afternoon of October 3. Nobody has ever solved the identity of the person, Reynolds, for whom Poe supposedly called out for hours before he died at the Washington University Hospital of Baltimore. Nobody has ever produced conclusive evidence, or so much as a first cousin to it...
The concept of "known-unknowns" is thematic to this biography as well as to Poe's macabre works. As human beings, we are aware of our limits, know that we will eventually decline and die, but we don't know how it will go down, we might never. Though Dawidziak arranges Poe's life into a gripping story, he emphasizes objectivity and research. At the very beginning, he disabuses the reader of the notion that any serious biographer knows how Poe died with complete certainty. A supposed quest for his cause of death is valuable only insofar as it turns the reader's attention to the underappreciated "knowns" of his life, many of which inspire even more unanswerable questions...continued
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(Reviewed by Jacob Lenz-Avila).
Daniel Stashower, Edgar Award-winning author of The Hour of Peril and The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder
Mark Dawidziak plumbs the mysteries of Poe's life and career with extraordinary skill and knowledge. Much like Montresor leading Fortunato through the winding catacombs, he leaves the reader surprised and thoroughly ensnared. J.W. Ocker, Edgar Award-winning author of Poe-Land
A poignant and realistic picture of Poe through the fascinating black prism of his mysterious death. Ron Powers, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Flags of Our Fathers and Mark Twain: A Life
Edgar Allan Poe has brooded over the world's comprehension as the dark prince of horror tales: a hollow-eyed specter surrounded by candle-tossed shadows, a raven on his writing table, an empty cognac glass at his elbow. In this revelatory biography, Mark Dawidziak honors the Gothic nature of Poe's work, yet sweeps open the curtains to throw full light upon this masterful poet and shaper of American literature.
By 1838, Edgar Allan Poe had earned a reputation as a sharp literary critic and skillful editor while based in Richmond, Virginia. To make the most of his talents, he had to move to a bigger and better arena. Boston was the center of book publishing, and New York led the nation in daily journalism and newspapers. But the magazine trade and American Gothic fiction, Poe's niches, flourished in Philadelphia, which was at that time, in the words of The Library Company of Philadelphia, "perhaps the most enlightened, genteel, urbane, and humane of American cities." In Mark Dawidziak's Poe biography A Mystery of Mysteries, scholar Edward G. Pettit of Philadelphia's Rosenbach Museum notes, "During the first half of the nineteenth century, more ...
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