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Building
POE
Biography
JOHN CARL MILLER
Louisiana State University Press
BATON ROUGE and LONDON
[[1977]]
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Contents
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Notes:
All material in this edition is protected by copyright, exclusively held by Louisiana State University Press. Permission has been obtained by the Poe Society of Baltimore from the copyright holder to provide this electronic edition for academic and research purposes only. The Poe Society of Baltimore asks all users of this material to respect these copyrights, and not to exceed what would typically be considered as fair use (generally interpreted as selective quotations and/or paraphrasing of only a small percentage of the total material, and with the appropriate attribution and citation).
The text for this electronic version of the book was taken from an original printed form, revised for XHTML/CSS and to follow our own formatting preferences. Pagination of the original edition has been included.
The table of contents is a reasonable representation of the table of contents from the original printing.
The Dedication page reads:
To my daughter and son,
Martha Marie and John Christoper
Prior to the preface, appears the following quotation:
ULYSSES. Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for Oblivion,
A great-siz’d monster of ingratitudes.
Those scraps are good deeds past, which are devour’d
As fast as they are made, forgot as soon
As done. Perseverance, dear my lord,
Keeps honour bright; to have done is to hang
Quite out of fashion. ... Take the instant way;
For honour travels in a strait so narrow,
Where one but goes abreast. Keep then the path;
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,
That all, with one consent, praise new-born gawds,
Though they are made and moulded of things past,
And give to dust that is a little gilt
More laud than gilt o’er dusted.
Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida
Act III, scene iii
The following text appears on the inner flaps of the dust jacket:
[inside front flap:]
Building Poe Biography
JOHN CARL MILLER
In the early 1870s John Henry Ingram, an Englishman impassioned by the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe, began his lifelong effort to clear Poe's reputation of the charges against it in Rufus Wilmot Griswold's slanderous biography. Poe's acquaintances, friends, and family responded to Ingram's plea for information, offering letters, books, articles, even a lock of Poe's hair. Ingram used these materials to lay the foundations, however distorted by his zealous protection of his subject, for his own and subsequent Poe biographies.
Building Poe Biography contains eighty-six of the letters Ingram collected, which reflect the people who surrounded the complex and perplexing figure of Poe. Here are letters from Poe's aunt and mother-in-law Maria Poe Clemm, his sister Rosalie, “Annie” Richmond, the married woman he deeply loved, and Marie Louise Shew Houghton, the practical nurse-physician who ministered to Poe's dying wife. In addition to these personal accounts Ingram also received letters from William Hand Browne, founder and editor of the Southern Magazine in Baltimore, and George W. Eveleth, a “self-appointed champion” of Poe who forwarded to Ingram a number of letters he solicited from Poe's associates.
John Carl Miller presents these letters with commentary on how Ingram employed [inside back flap:] the information given him. He performs a valuable service for all Poe scholars in sorting out Ingram's biases and errors and rectifying long-established misconceptions about Poe. Most of the letters Miller examines have not previously been available in print. Also included in this volume are two bibliographies of the books and articles Ingram wrote between 1874 and 1916 about Poe and other subjects.
JOHN CARL MILLER was born in Escatawpa, Mississippi, and now lives in Norfolk, Virginia, where he is professor of English at Old Dominion University. He received his doctorate in English from the University of Virginia and is the author of John Henry Ingram's Poe Collection at the University of Virginia.
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[S:0 - JCMBPB, 1977] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Bookshelf - Building Poe Biography - (1977)