Poe.

Poe. By James M. Hutchisson. Willie Morris Books in Memoir and Biography. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, c. 2005. Pp. xviii, 290. $30.00, ISBN 1-57806-721-9.)

James M. Hutchisson's Poe is a difficult read--difficult because the biography tells the heart-wrenching story of the psychological and physical decline of one of America's greatest writers. Although Edgar Allan Poe has been the subject of numerous literary studies and biographies, Hutchisson's work approaches Poe's life from a fresh perspective. Claiming in the introduction to focus on aspects of Poe's life that have not received particularly close attention, Hutchisson examines Poe's relationship to the South, his work as a journalist and literary critic, and the influence of the temperance movement and Freemasonry on his writings. Poe is an engaging, thoroughly researched book that delves into the complicated nature of the writer's creative inspiration, his turbulent associations with numerous fellow writers and editors, his complex relationships with the women in his life, and the reasons for his decline in his final years.

Although accounts of Poe' s life have been muddled, in part because readers have long confused him with his deranged characters, Poe becomes in Hutchisson's biography a human being experiencing the devastating illness of his wife and coping with the competitive world of mid-nineteenth-century American publishing. Poe's bitter feuds with fellow writers such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whom he accused of plagiarism, are at the forefront of Hutchisson's study, which focuses not only on the emotional turmoil of Poe's life that provided much of the inspiration for his work but also on his downward professional spiral that ended with his death. Facing renewed difficulties in providing financially for his family and dealing with his wife Virginia's continued poor health, Poe explained to Evert A. Duyckinck in the mid-1840s that he felt he had "just awakened from some horrible dream.... I really believe that I have been mad--but indeed 1 have had abundant reason to be so" (quoted on p. 187). Interestingly, Hutchisson speculates that a brain tumor was actually what killed Poe, noting it is the "best explanation for Poe's peculiar behavior throughout his life" (p. 247).

Although Poe has long been claimed by the South, no scholarship so convincingly argues for the influence of the South on his life and work as does Poe. Hutchisson calls particular attention to John Pendleton Kennedy, who became for Poe a father figure and the first to help him successfully attain work as a writer. The biography also briefly points to the influence on Poe's poetry by the traditional ballad stanza associated with African American spirituals and work songs, his belief that American literature, as Hutchisson explains, "suffered from a New England bias," and his long-standing belief that he received unfair treatment because of his southern birth and political leanings (pp. 182-83).

Most importantly, Hutchisson's biography reframes American literary history. Reclaiming Poe for the South, Hutchisson also reasserts the prominence of his place in American literature, quoting William Carlos Williams, who wrote of Poe, "in him American literature is anchored, in him alone, on solid ground.... On him is FOUNDED A LITERATURE" (p. 256).

MARY WEAKS-BAXTER

Rockford College