Darkness Becomes Bright

A fascinating and intimate inquiry into the shadowy life and horrifyingly compelling work of Edgar Allan Poe, and why we are drawn to darkness in art

Since Edgar Allan Poe’s mysterious death in 1849, his stories and poems have captivated millions of readers around the world. One hundred seventy-five years later, why do we continue to descend into the darkness of his imagination—and of the genres, from horror to crime, that he pioneered?

In these spellbinding and singular book, Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant winner Emily Ogden plumbs the darkness within Poe and enters it alongside him. She interweaves stories from his mysterious and tragic life—from his strange disappearances and tortured romances to his nearly fatal use of opium—with those of his most famous readers and translators, including poet Charles Baudelaire, writer Julio Cortázar, and psychoanalyst Marie Bonaparte, a descendant of Napoleon and a patient of Sigmund Freud.

Tracing their passionate attachments to Poe and Ogden’s own—unexpectedly sparked when she taught an introductory Poe course at the University of Virginia, where Poe himself was once a student—Darkness Becomes Bright makes a different case for literature from the one we most often hear (that it engenders empathy). This exquisite volume shows how Poe’s vision and its echoes across the generations allows us to make peace with our own flawed humanity.