I appreciate the publisher allowing me to read this book. This is a really good book. it kept me interested until the end and I even felt like I learned something a nice bonus. Highly recommend.

A life growing like the deadly nightshade, beautiful and lustrous (illustrious). Perfect reading for any fan of Edgar Allen Poe.

This is an interesting way to approach another biography of E.A. Poe. I enjoyed the look at the different scientific changes that were happening along with the experiences of Poe and his interactions with those changes. I did hope there would be a little more in the way of new information, but that may be on me since I have spent time studying both subjects pretty extensively.

I would recommend this work to those that enjoy history from many different perspectives, such as those interested in literary history, biographies, scientific history, American history, etc.

Thank you for the darc of this work in exchange for my honest review.



*trying to catch up on posting reviews from last year, because I was unable to access NetGalley. Reviews have been posted on socials, GoodReads, and seller locations prior to now.

I love Poe. I've been reading his poetry and short stories since I hit double digits. I know a fair bit about him but this book... man, it blew my mind. Turns out Poe didn't just invent the short story as we know it today AND write poetry which was sensational across the English speaking world AND introduce the world to detective fiction AND make a mark for American on a previously very British-controlled horror scene.

Guess what. That madman genius was also a SCIENTIST. This book shows a completely new and different side to Poe's life than most people know, and what greater praise can I give than to say it made me love Poe even more?

I want to thank the publishers and NetGalley for allowing me the opportunity to read and review this book.
I have always enjoyed the works of Edgar Allan Poe. It was very enlightening to read a very detailed account of Poe’s life. The book describes in detail the many hardships from being orphaned to ill treatment by his guardian. Poe’s life was filled with struggles and failures and challenges that seem insurmountable. Despite these obstacles Poe was driven to study and write.
This book is extremely detailed and a comprehensive account of one of America’s most misunderstood authors. The book explains the inaccurate characterization that was falsely created by a literary rival after Poe’s death.
This book is for anyone wanting to in learn more about Poe.

For Edgar Allan Poe fans (or literature fans in general) this is a fascinating read — a new bio of Poe looking at him through the lens of his relationship with scientific discovery and new developments. Poe was obsessed with science, and (mind-blowingly) in 1848 gave a public lecture on cosmology where he postulated theories decades ahead of his time — essentially articulating the Big Bang theory, the space-time continuum, and more. Tresch’s book takes Poe seriously as a scientific philosopher and tells a very interesting story about how it interacts with his personal life and his fiction.

If you are looking for a biography that goes beyond the printed works of Edgar Allan Poe, then this is the biography for you. I have learned so much more in just the first few pages of this book, than I did in all my years of schooling.
At first, I tried to look at this from the publisher’s point of view. A work is presented about the life of an American literary institution. Someone who whole college courses are taught about. Someone who is studied from birth to death, what more could be said. Well, this biographer found it, wrote it, and nailed it, in my opinion.
This biography isn’t just a dry, dusty regurgitation of facts either. It’s interspersed with works I’d not read, snippets of his life I hadn’t known. It’s not limited to his writings either. The author discusses Poe’s love of science and math, his time at West Point and how hard he worked to gain entry only to leave before finishing. But it’s his whole life, not just the early years like I’ve listed here. We float through Poe’s whole, albeit short life. Through the ups, and the downs that we’ve all heard about. Poe’s flaws are laid wide open for the reader to traipse through, but we also see his drive, his wit, his genius.
In my opinion, this is the best biography I’ve read about this esteemed literary giant, and even though Poe has been gone 172 years, I feel closer to him now than I ever have. Thank you, Mr. Tresch for such a moving biography. If you want to know more about the original master of both detective novels and horror stories, please read this biography, you won’t be disappointed.

**I received an ARC of this book from the Publisher and NetGalley and this is my honest opinion.

Exploring the influence of the sciences on the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe, Tresch’s lively and brilliantly researched biography helps combat misperceptions of the author as little more than a gifted but tortured Goth and offers an intriguing portrait of the American scientific landscape during his short lifetime.

Poe excelled at “Astronomy, Conic Sections, Algebra, Fluxions, [and] Mechanics” at the Richmond Academy, studied mathematics and engineering while a cadet at West Point, and gravitated to Philadelphia, then a leading center of American scientific research and discourse, in his thirties. He wrote a poem inspired by the discovery of a supernova and produced an accessible edition of Thomas Wyatt’s Manual of Conchology; adapted from what he erroneously hoped would be a career-regenerating lecture, his Eureka: An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe is dedicated to the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt and contains several prescient scientific intuitions amid its factual blunders. Tresch does full justice to the better-known aspects of Poe’s biography, including his imaginative gifts, fluctuating fortunes, difficult personal life and troubled psyche. But by shining a light on his often overlooked fascination with ideas, particularly those related to the truths behind the universe’s wonders, he offers a fresh and to my mind fascinating way to understand this familiar figure.

Though many today perceive science as a dry and dispassionate discipline, it felt anything but clinical in Poe’s time. Tresch’s vivid descriptions of its claims and controversies, advances and altercations—not to mention the bravura showmanship with which many discoveries were either presented or debunked—make clear why a mind like Poe’s might find it endlessly fascinating. As the subtitle’s reference to the forging of American science suggests, this was an era during which the scientific norms we take for granted were only just being established. For the moment, however, it was a world that could be as flamboyant as the circus and as unpoliced as the Wild West.

As Tresch writes,"The senses of Poe and his contemporaries were bombarded with new effects: electromagnetic signals, brilliant light shows, clattering city streets, mesmeric emanations, machine-printed words. They were also confronted with new methods and theories for analyzing the universe, curing illness, justifying political decisions, organizing society, and shaping minds. Today’s image of science is one of laboratories, microscopes, and white coats: a regulated and uniform undertaking, heavily funded by government and recognized as the best—indeed, for some, the only—means of obtaining reliable knowledge about the world. Yet when Poe embarked on his career in the 1830s, this image of science was at best a distant dream….In the popular press and lecture halls, self-appointed experts announced dubious observations and flamboyant theories on every topic. No sufficiently powerful authorities existed—whether scientific associations, national academies, or peer-reviewed journals—to separate reliable claims from errors or outright fraud."

Tresch is equally skillful at discussing some of the scientific issues that inform Poe’s literary output. Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Poe’s work used tropes of the macabre, the sensational and the Gothic to tease out philosophical and scientific questions. The relationship between matter and energy or spirit; the nature of death; galvanism; time travel; the uses of intuition and ratiocination in apprehending truth; the tension between the verifiable and the illusory or deceptive; the influence of emotion, experience and psychic states on perceptions of reality as well as on notions of justice: from specific topics to broad queries, Poe’s best work probes many of the most urgent intellectual preoccupations of his day and ours.

While biographies are customarily understood as providing information, I think their ability to awaken curiosity is an equally if not perhaps more important measure of their value. Raising fresh questions as well as answering familiar ones, a good biographer grinds and polishes a lens through which we can see a particular life and body of work anew, making us want to look again and more closely. John Tresch’s The Reason for the Darkness of the Night is a really satisfying book. However paradoxically, the fact that it also left me hungry is part of its power. For the first time since working my way (rather resentfully) through his stories and poems in college, I’m eager to revisit Poe’s work: to peer at it through the gleaming lens Tresch presents, and see what new wonders I discover.

This was such an interesting book! this past year i've taken into reading more non-fiction, and this caught my attention because I have studied Poe in my English degree, and I also knew a few things about him thanks to general culture, but I have learnt so many new things! It was so interesting to learn about Poe not only from a literary perspective, but also from a scientific one, I think it is interesting how Poe is such a notorious figure, and yet there are so many things about him that are not well known.

The formatting of this was terrible; the amount of text in each page was too much and the font so small, which made me feel as if the book was dragging on and on more than it actually was.

If you enjoy reading memoirs and biographies, I highly recommend this.

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux for an advanced copy of this new biography.

Edgar Allan Poe has been the subject of many articles, essays, studies, documentaries, movies, novels even a rock album. What could be left to write about after almost 175 years that hasn't been mined before. John Tresch in his new biography The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science shows that there is still much to learn about this doomed writer and his influences.

Discussing not only Poe's troubled life, an his literary aspirations, the book also covers Poe's scientific bent, started as a young child and one he carried on in his writings, an a later attempt on the lecture circuits. Mr. Tresch discusses and the growth of scientific literacy in America, the various factions who argued and feuded to control this burgeoning community and how Poe found himself in the middle, making enemies among men of science as easily as he did among editors of literary magazines.

Science and technology and their affect on Poe is interesting, and one I don't remember reading about. I know that some of his stories could be considered science fiction, or the science bunkum that was big among various newspapers for circulation numbers. I knew that Poe attended West Point, but I had no idea the lengths that he went to attend, I'll leave that to the reader to find out. And his attendance I thought was from his family attempting to make something of him, not that Poe himself wanted to go for West Point was considered one of the best places to learn engineering, which he hoped would secure him a future.

A very interesting incredibly well written and researched biography, that makes one look at Poe's works with new eyes and ideas. Highly recommended for both literary and scientific history fans, and for those who just enjoy a great read.

Approaching a canonical, American titan of literature such as Edgar Allan Poe must seem incredibly daunting for a biographer. In Poe we have a man already the subject of countless articles, books, and films that, thanks in part to some cleverly placed slander after his death, carries with him the stigma of alcoholism and itinerant poverty to go along with his genius in letters. John Tresch's solution to that is to approach Poe from a novel angle, taking into account the burgeoning scientific scene of his time and the author's contributions to the cause as well as the inspirations he took into his writing.

The Reason for the Darkness of the Night paints Poe in a far different light from the other biographical accounts of his life that I have read. Rather than completely focusing on Poe's reputation as tortured and poverty stricken goth genius, Tresch shows Poe as actively engaged with, and often at odds with, the wider scientific community around him. Alternating between debunking hoaxes and perpetuating them himself as well as fraternizing and then later being at loggerheads with the premier scientific minds of the time, Tresch shows Poe as an often enigmatic figure who nevertheless added (and took inspiration from) scientific advancement far more than he is given lasting credit for.

Tresch also does a fantastic job showing the overarching sadness and tangle of contradictions that defined Poe's life. He achieved critical success with his writing and became a household name with the publication of the Raven, but was never able to turn this into any sort of lasting monetary success. Tresch juxtaposes glowing critical reviews of Poe's work with stark depictions of the author and his family engulfed in near starvation poverty made worse by his unpredictable bouts of drunken sickness. While Poe's struggles cannot be denied, Tresch ardently defends and debunks the image of the man dying "friendless and alone in a gutter" as the product of jealous posthumous revisionist history and proves Poe's undeniable contributions to both American literature and modern science.

**I was given a copy of this book by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. My thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux**

Ever since my mom quoted Edgar Allan Poe's poetry to me as a child, I was fascinated by the enigma and mystery which enshrouded him. He seemed almost otherworldly. But this book answered many questions as well as posed others. Poe is still mysterious but I know much more about him now than ever before. He accomplished so much by the time he died at 40...it makes me wonder what else he would have accomplished had he died at 75.

Most of us know Poe best by his powerful poems such as the dark and stark "The Raven" and short stories including The Pit and the Pendulum, The Cask of Amontillado and The Tell-Tale Heart and his character Auguste Dupin in The Murders in the Rue Morgue and others. As a young man he wrote for and edited many newspapers, tantalizing with his cliffhangers and ongoing sagas. Poe's scientific slant was completely new to me, though unsurprising. He was also a brilliant lecturer and expounded upon religion, philosophy, astronomy and metaphysics. He believed "Eureka" to be his best work which I now long to read.

Poe married his young cousin, Virginia, who had chronic illnesses much of her life. At times he said he thought he was insane. He had been an orphan and had a cruel step father. Extreme poverty and homelessness were common to him. To me it seemed he was sorely misunderstood and in ways much ahead of his time. He liked Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde but disparaged Longfellow. Even after his death he was scorned, though also venerated.

Poe's quick intelligence and wit must have been truly fascinating. I would love to see him debate his contemporaries such as Wilde. Poe did enjoy spurts of fame now and then during his lifetime but as he was an orphan and not connected to wealth or position was not as known as he ought to have been.

My sincere thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for the privilege of reading this book about a writer I've held in esteem and admired for his unparalleled writing of his time.

3.5 This is the first full length biography I have read of Poe and it revealed many, to me at least, surprising insights. Science vs. literary pursuits. There is much I had known of Poe, snippets I read here and there, in other books. I did know he went to West Point, served in the military, married his cousin, etc. What I didn't know was his avid interest in science. An interest that formed in his youth and that was reflected in some of his poems and fiction.

His life was prolific but personally sad. The early death if his wife, his drinking all presented challenges that he never seemed to overcome. His last lectures on science, were ones he hoped would provide redemption and bring him back into the public eye.

The author I think has presented a good portrait of this tortured genius. I enjoyed his insightful outlook and discussions of Poe's many literary pursuits.

ARC from Netgalley.

The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science by John Tresch is the first biography I have read of Poe. I was totally enthralled. Tresch's approach gives us a man of technological and scientific insight, an expert craftsman with the pen, an original thinker, and a relentless worker. And yet, everything was against Poe, he struggled to provide basic needs, and his dreams were always beyond reach.

It is one of the saddest biographies I have ever read. A genius with everything against him, a man who achieved great heights and died with nothing. Had he been born in a different time, would his fate have been happier?

I first read Poe in my grandfather's 1926 paperback 101 Famous Poems in which I discovered The Raven, The Bells, and To Helen. Then, I discovered a complete set of Poe on gramp's shelves and borrowed the volumes so often, he told me to just keep them. This was almost 57 years ago!

Like my own grandfather, Poe's father had abandoned his mother and with her death was an orphan. Like my grandfather, Poe was taken to be raised by a family without formal adoption. Like my grandfather, Poe was sent into the world without enough financial support to live on. Like Poe, my grandfather was an engineer, a writer, relentlessly working three jobs to support his family. Unlike my grandfather, Poe had been raised by a wealthy family and had expectations of being supported to continue that lifestyle. Plus, he had inherited the family problem of alcoholism.

Poe embraced two interests: the advancement of a distinct American literature that could rival Europe's, and an interest in science and technology. His classical education, training at West Point, deep reading, and relentless pursuit of financial security and fame was derailed by his inability to handle alcohol, which was almost impossible to avoid in society or business.

He took on his aunt and cousin as family, his love for both deep and sincere. They starved with him and followed him from home to home. He married his child bride cousin, who died of tuberculosis, perhaps the inspiration for his poem Annabel Lee.

Poe lived in an age when science and pseudoscience and faith clashed. He reacted to the new scientific ideas that precluded purpose and meaning to existence.

Tresch begins and ends with Poe's lecture Eureka! which presented radical ideas that later were seen as foreshadowing current theories accepted in the scientific community. He neither envisioned a universe controlled by a deity, or abandoned by a deity, or once created remained unchanged. His universe was dynamic and evolving. He saw that science had its limits in understanding the human experience and place in the universe.

Poe lived during the rise of the magazine, and he relentlessly wrote articles of every kind, published in magazines such as Graham's Ladies and Gentleman's Magazine; forty years ago I bought an 1841 bound volume in a Maine antique shop which included numerous works by Poe, articles on cryptography and autography (analyzing signatures), The Colloquy of Monos and Una, and the poems Israfel and To Helen.

It was so interesting to read Tresch's comments on these articles and poems. The Colloquy, he comments, includes lines that foretold the future: "Meantime huge smoking cities arose, innumerable. Green leaves shrank before the hot breath of furnaces. The fair face of Nature was deformed as with the ravages of some loathsome disease.[...]now it appears that we had worked out our own destruction in the perversion of our taste, or rather in the blind neglect of its culture in the schools." He continues, "Taste along could have led us gently back to Beauty, to Nature, and to Life."

With my new insights into Poe, I really must return and reread his work.

I received a free galley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.