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POE'S LITERARY BATTLES
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The Critic in the Context of His Literary Milieu
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Sidney P. Moss
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Durham, North Carolina
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
1963
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CONTENTS
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Sidney P. Moss was born in Liverpool, England on March 27, 1917, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants to that country from what is now Latvia and Belarus. At the age of 3, his mother brought him and his 2 surviving siblings to Chicago where his father, a shoemaker, had gone into business with his brother. His mother was widowed soon after her arrival in Chicago, and Sidney went through Chicago public schools, assuming that he would be a factory worker as his mother and older brother, a brilliant auto-didact, were. Instead, he was drafted into the Second World War and, after spending 5 years in North Africa and Europe with the US Army, he returned to Chicago with a draft of a novel of his wartime experiences, co-written with his older brother Samuel Moss, in hand. This novel was published by Ziff Davis in 1948 as Thy Men Shall Fall. With the encouragement of his first wife, Rita Lovell Moss, Sidney took advantage of the G.I. Bill to go to college, starting as a freshman in 1947. He earned his B. S. in 1950. He wrote his a Master's thesis in 1951 (Robinson Jeffers as a Narrative Poet), and a doctoral thesis in 1954 (Poe's Literary Battles). All of these degrees were from the University of Illinois, Urbana. He re-worked his dissertation and published it with the same title with Duke University Press in 1963. Of the many books he went on to research and publish, this one was probably his best. He taught at Murray State University in Murray, Kentucky, from 1956-1964, and at Southern Illinois University from 1964 until his retirement as a Distinguished Professor in 1987. He was a Fulbright lecturer in Dublin in 1969. During his career and well into his retirement, he wrote and researched many books and articles on Edgar Allan Poe, the Transcendentalists, and — with his second wife, Carolyn Moss — a number of books and articles on Charles Dickens. He died in January 26, 2012.
(Note: Most of the material for this brief biography was graciously provided by Dr. Moss's family.)
The following text appears on inside flaps of the dust jacket:
[Inside front flap:]
This book, the outgrowth of almost a decade of research, is the first full-scale treatment of Poe's literary battles and seems destined to be an indispensable work to students of Poe.
Mr. Moss, a specialist in nineteenth-century American literature, focuses his study on three major points. The first is that Poe's attacks, despite some obvious lapses, were neither sporadic nor spiteful, but unified campaigns in a war that had two objectives: to smash the power of the Boston and New York cliques, and to establish literary conditions favorable for authorship.
The second point is suggested by Mr. Moss in his Preface: “These battles serve as a kind of stereoscopic viewer by which I attempt to see Poe's criticism in its contemporary and therefore three-dimensional context. They also provide a frame for discussing his characteristic critical views and the typical responses he made to his literary times.”
The third point is that Poe's grotesque reputation was largely shaped by his literary enemies who tried to discredit him as a critic by discrediting him as a man, a process that Poe abetted by the life he led.
To demonstrate the validity of these views, Mr. Moss recreates the literary period in which Poe worked, the forces against which he contended, and the issues which he espoused. To accomplish this, he presents all the available evidence pertinent to Poe's literary battles and interprets that [inside back flap:] evidence, however his interpretation may differ from current opinion. His object is not so much a defense of Poe as a critic as it is an understanding of him in that capacity.
Sidney P. Moss received his A.B., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois. He has been Head of the Research Department and Assistant Editor of the Spencer Press and is now Professor of English at Murray State College.
From the copyright page:
® 1963, Duke University Press
Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number 63-9010 Cambridge University Press, London N.W.i, England
This book is published with the assistance of a grant to the Duke University Press by the Ford Foundation
Printed in the United States of America by the Kingsport Press, Inc., Kingsport, Tenn.
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Notes:
The text for this electronic version of this 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. Although considerable effort has been made to be true to the original printed edition, some modifications have been made in formatting for this electronic presentation.
All material in this edition is protected by copyright, exclusively held by the estate of Sidney P. Moss. Duke University Press confirmed that rights were transferred back to the author in 1985. Permission has been obtained by the Poe Society of Baltimore from Dr. Moss's estate to provide this electronic edition for academic and research purposes only. The Poe Society of Baltimore asks all users of this material to respect the authors’ copyright, and not to exceed what would typically be considered as fair use.
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[S:0 - PLB, 1963] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Bookshelf - Poe's Literary Battles - (1963)