On his book The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City
Cover Interview of May 12, 2021
In a nutshell
The Man of the Crowd is a biography of Edgar Allan
Poe that focuses on the four American cities—Richmond, Baltimore, Philadelphia,
and New York—where he made his career as a writer and editor. Poe lived in a
time of rapid urbanization, and I contend that his life and work are best
understood in terms of that development, and in terms of what was happening in
these particular cities in the 1830s and 1840s.
The book chronicles Poe’s entire life, but I arrange his
story into chapters corresponding with specific cities. In the first chapter, I
highlight, among other things, the fact that Richmond was a center of the
domestic slave trade; Poe grew up and later worked within blocks of auction
houses, jails, and hotels that provided the infrastructure for that trade. I
speculate that some of the physical cruelty and sadism that shows up in Poe’s
later fiction might have been inspired by the dehumanizing practices associated
with slave auctions.
In the chapter that centers on Baltimore, we see Poe
experiencing real poverty as a man in his early 20s. There he began writing
fiction for magazines—not a very reliable way to make a living, but it was what
he would do for the rest of his life. He also found a family with his aunt
Maria Clemm and her daughter Virginia, whom he would soon marry.
In the third chapter, on Philadelphia, I describe Poe
hitting his stride as a fiction writer. Philadelphia was a city whose image
depended on orderliness and Quaker probity, but urban squalor was barely hidden
behind grand façades, and mob violence was a constant threat. I trace that
contradiction through discussions of some of Poe’s lesser-known satires as well
as “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and the proto-detective story “The Man of
the Crowd”, which gives my book its title.
Poe moved to New York in 1844 to be at the center of
American publishing, and much of his writing during his years in Manhattan
comment on the world of magazines, literary reputations, and the terms of
success and failure. Poe even wrote a series of gossipy personality profiles
called “The Literati of New York City”, while fomenting scandal and rivalry
with the Boston literary establishment.
The final chapter is titled “In Transit”—though still
ostensibly living in New York (specifically, in what would become the Bronx),
Poe spent about half of this period traveling, visiting Philadelphia and
Richmond before his life ended tragically and mysteriously in Baltimore.
Throughout the book, I stress the influence not just of
these cities but of the city as a phenomenon of the early nineteenth
century, and I see Poe, for all his genius, as a man who, like many others, saw
opportunity in rapidly growing urban centers but more often than not found
frustration and disappointment.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
The Man of the Crowd is a biography of Edgar Allan Poe that focuses on the four American cities—Richmond, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York—where he made his career as a writer and editor. Poe lived in a time of rapid urbanization, and I contend that his life and work are best understood in terms of that development, and in terms of what was happening in these particular cities in the 1830s and 1840s.
The book chronicles Poe’s entire life, but I arrange his story into chapters corresponding with specific cities. In the first chapter, I highlight, among other things, the fact that Richmond was a center of the domestic slave trade; Poe grew up and later worked within blocks of auction houses, jails, and hotels that provided the infrastructure for that trade. I speculate that some of the physical cruelty and sadism that shows up in Poe’s later fiction might have been inspired by the dehumanizing practices associated with slave auctions.
In the chapter that centers on Baltimore, we see Poe experiencing real poverty as a man in his early 20s. There he began writing fiction for magazines—not a very reliable way to make a living, but it was what he would do for the rest of his life. He also found a family with his aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter Virginia, whom he would soon marry.
In the third chapter, on Philadelphia, I describe Poe hitting his stride as a fiction writer. Philadelphia was a city whose image depended on orderliness and Quaker probity, but urban squalor was barely hidden behind grand façades, and mob violence was a constant threat. I trace that contradiction through discussions of some of Poe’s lesser-known satires as well as “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and the proto-detective story “The Man of the Crowd”, which gives my book its title.
Poe moved to New York in 1844 to be at the center of American publishing, and much of his writing during his years in Manhattan comment on the world of magazines, literary reputations, and the terms of success and failure. Poe even wrote a series of gossipy personality profiles called “The Literati of New York City”, while fomenting scandal and rivalry with the Boston literary establishment.
The final chapter is titled “In Transit”—though still ostensibly living in New York (specifically, in what would become the Bronx), Poe spent about half of this period traveling, visiting Philadelphia and Richmond before his life ended tragically and mysteriously in Baltimore.
Throughout the book, I stress the influence not just of these cities but of the city as a phenomenon of the early nineteenth century, and I see Poe, for all his genius, as a man who, like many others, saw opportunity in rapidly growing urban centers but more often than not found frustration and disappointment.