On his book The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City
Cover Interview of May 12, 2021
Lastly
I wrote in the book’s introduction that this is not a work
of academic literary criticism (my background) but that I wanted to write primarily for
a non-specialist audience with this project. So when I did discuss specific works by Poe, I could hear
the clock ticking, if you know what I mean. I wanted to make these stories more
interesting to readers than they would be if you just picked them up without
knowing anything about the context. But even when I discussed the title story,
“The Man of the Crowd”, I kept it to about three and a half pages. I just tried
to be selective in the analysis, keeping the book’s focus and my “ideal” reader
in mind.
At the same time, I didn’t want to leave significant gaps in
the biographical record—I tried to tell a good, true story. If I succeeded, the
book works both as an introduction to Edgar Allan Poe and his life for people
who are casually acquainted with him and as a book that’s making an argument—that
Poe’s career is inseparable from the development of the American city. I hope
readers will recalibrate their image of Poe as they read the book and
understand him as a writer who was very much engaged with his surroundings, and
who struggled to succeed in a rapidly changing world.
[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
Lastly
I wrote in the book’s introduction that this is not a work of academic literary criticism (my background) but that I wanted to write primarily for a non-specialist audience with this project. So when I did discuss specific works by Poe, I could hear the clock ticking, if you know what I mean. I wanted to make these stories more interesting to readers than they would be if you just picked them up without knowing anything about the context. But even when I discussed the title story, “The Man of the Crowd”, I kept it to about three and a half pages. I just tried to be selective in the analysis, keeping the book’s focus and my “ideal” reader in mind.
At the same time, I didn’t want to leave significant gaps in the biographical record—I tried to tell a good, true story. If I succeeded, the book works both as an introduction to Edgar Allan Poe and his life for people who are casually acquainted with him and as a book that’s making an argument—that Poe’s career is inseparable from the development of the American city. I hope readers will recalibrate their image of Poe as they read the book and understand him as a writer who was very much engaged with his surroundings, and who struggled to succeed in a rapidly changing world.