This one will be…brief. Heh.

I’ve already read one book this year that could be partially categorized as a biography of Edgar Allan Poe. However, when I saw Peter Ackroyd’s rather diminutive biography on one of my favorite authors, tucked away on a shelf at the library, I decided in that instant that I needed to read yet another one.

Admittedly, I didn’t really learn much from Ackroyd’s telling of Poe’s upsetting life and death. And it is upsetting. Just like so many of his macabre tales, his was a tortured soul. Some of it was external, but much of his torment sprang from demons of an internal sickness that raged within him until the very end.

If you’ve never read a biography on Mr. Poe, then I would highly recommend this one. It’s a bit more thorough than my previous Poe-related read this year (although that one is holistically more interesting) and it never does Poe the dishonor of sugar-coating any aspect of his life. However, if you have read anything on Poe, you, too, might find this to be simply an exercise in revisiting already known information in a well-researched and well-written way.

Final Verdict: It was an interesting refresher course on Poe’s life that I will now gladly return to the library.