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The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science - Paperback | Diverse Reads

The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science

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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.

ISBN-13: 9781250849403

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Picador

Publication Date: 10-04-2022

Pages: 448

Product Dimensions: 5.30(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.90(d)

John Tresch is Professor of History of Art, Science, and Folk Practice at the Warburg Institute in the University of London. He previously taught history of science and technology in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania for over a decade. He has held fellowships at the New York Public Library, Columbia University, the University of Chicago, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. He is the author of The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Subject: The Universe 3

Part I From Allan to Poe

1 The Young Astronomer 15

2 In Jefferson's Experiment 29

3 Exile, Artificer, Cadet 41

Part II Setting Sail

4 A Baltimore Apprenticeship 61

5 Richmond: The Palpable Obscure 74

6 Delirious Design 95

Part III Philadelphia

7 The Athens of America 111

8 Methods Grotesque and Arabesque 131

9 Dizzy Heights 152

10 The Tide Turns 173

11 The March of Science and Quacks 191

Part IV New York City

12 The Market for Novelty 211

13 A Man of Wonders 238

14 The IMP of the Perverse 258

Part V To the Plutonian Shore

15 A Spectacle for Angels 283

16 The Plots of God 293

17 Falling Star 318

Conclusion: From a Lighthouse 337

Notes 351

Acknowledgments 411

Index 413