The Reason for the Darkness of the Night

The Reason for the Darkness of the Night
Author :
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages : 288
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780374717445
ISBN-13 : 0374717443
Rating : 4/5 (443 Downloads)

Book Synopsis The Reason for the Darkness of the Night by : John Tresch

Download or read book The Reason for the Darkness of the Night written by John Tresch and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.


The Reason for the Darkness of the Night Related Books

The Reason for the Darkness of the Night
Language: en
Pages: 288
Authors: John Tresch
Categories: Biography & Autobiography
Type: BOOK - Published: 2021-06-15 - Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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—hi
Out of the Dark Night
Language: en
Pages: 166
Authors: Achille Mbembe
Categories: Political Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2021-01-19 - Publisher: Columbia University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Achille Mbembe is one of the world’s most profound critics of colonialism and its consequences, a major figure in the emergence of a new wave of French critic
Learning to Walk in the Dark
Language: en
Pages: 208
Authors: Barbara Brown Taylor
Categories: Religion
Type: BOOK - Published: 2014-06-30 - Publisher: Canterbury Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In this long awaited follow-up to the best-selling An Altar in the World, Barbara Brown Taylor explores ‘the treasures of darkness’ that the Bible speaks ab
The End of Night
Language: en
Pages: 332
Authors: Paul Bogard
Categories: Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2013-07-09 - Publisher: Little, Brown

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A deeply panoramic tour of the night, from its brightest spots to the darkest skies we have left. A starry night is one of nature's most magical wonders. Yet in
Nightfall
Language: en
Pages: 373
Authors: Jake Halpern
Categories: Juvenile Fiction
Type: BOOK - Published: 2015-09-22 - Publisher: Penguin

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The dark will bring your worst nightmares to light in this gripping and eerie survival story! On Marin’s island, sunrise doesn’t come every twenty-four hour