A fascinating new biography of Edgar Allan Poe (1809—1849) — sure to be another bestselling biography for Peter Ackroyd.

Poe's life was Gothic, mysterious, theatrical, fatally flawed, original, dark, dazzling, satirical and inventive — in short, an ideal subject for Peter Ackroyd. In fact, 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. Tennyson described him as “the most original genius that America has produced.”

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). He influenced European romanticism and was the harbinger of both Symbolism and Surrealism. Peter Ackroyd claims that Poe found his family among writers — writers not only of his time but of the future generations who were influenced by the power of his imagination.