Darkness Becomes Bright
On the Brief Life and Immortal Art of Edgar Allan Poe
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Sep 29, 2026
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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. Two centuries 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 this spellbinding and singular book, Guggenheim Fellow and Whiting grant recipient 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. This exquisite volume shows how Poe’s vision and its echoes across the generations allow us to make peace with our own flawed humanity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ogden (On Not Knowing), an English Professor at the University of Virginia, offers an innovative if disjointed exploration of Edgar Allan Poe's life and work and his influence on other writers. Obsessed with death and darkness, Poe (1809–1849) not only invented the detective story and had an outsized influence on modernist literature, Ogden argues, but served as a welcome companion for writers seeking to confront the loneliness, pain, and madness of life. Ogden opens in 1841, when Poe was publishing some of his most famous short stories like "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." He had dreams of running his own magazine, but his alcoholism and erratic behavior foiled such attempts. Ogden then shifts to an examination of Julio Cortázar (1914–1984), an Argentinian author who translated Poe and whom Ogden says Poe inspired to write short stories "in which the eerie wedges its way through a gap in the ordinary." Ogden then returns to Poe's childhood, explaining he was orphaned and separated from his siblings at age three, before exploring his impact on psychoanalyst Marie Bonaparte (1882–1962), who used Poe's stories to work through the trauma of losing her mother shortly after birth and went on to write a Freudian biography of Poe. The book's inventive format unfortunately results in a jumbled reading experience. Readers will struggle to follow its many winding threads.
