Poe's Major Crisis, (1970), title page and table of contents

[inside front flap:]

This volume presents a moving and coherent account of Poe's major crisis, a crisis that abbreviated the man's career and life: his libel suit against the owners of the New York Mirror. Though Poe finally won the case, his name was dragged through the journals of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, of New Orleans, St. Louis, and Charleston, until he was discredited with his audience and literally almost starved out of the literary profession.

To present this crisis in its full scope, Sidney P. Moss, an authority on Poe and the nineteenth-century literary scene, has not only used documents other investigators have found but has uncovered many new documents, hitherto un-located or inaccessible, so that now all the pieces of the puzzle are in place for the first time. The picture that emerges is of a Poe, not paranoiac as some have contended, but helplessly persecuted. As a contemporary editor observed, Poe “seems to invite the ‘Punchy’ writers among us to take up their pens and impale him for public amusement.” The documentary method this book adopts gives the reader a powerful sense of reality, a sense of being on the scene and a witness to this crisis.

Mr. Moss, besides studying the lawsuit in its own right, uses it as a dramatic device for reporting Poe's last years in depth. He shows why Poe was reduced to cranking out hackwork; why he needed to court notoriety; why he had to neutralize the vilification of his persecutors if he was to survive in the journalistic and literary world. Among other things, the author explains why Poe felt forced to move out of Manhattan to the village of Fordham; the strategems he used to counter the effects of his enemies; why he fortified himself with liquor on his rare visits to New York's literary district; why the few critical articles he continued to write were innocuous. And all this, as is shown, when Poe was beginning to be heralded abroad as a great original [inside back flap:] writer. As Evert A. Duyckinck wrote in a hitherto unlocated article, “While Mr. Poe ... is pestered ... at home by penny-a-liners ... and denied all ability and morality whatever — it is curious ... to see what is made of his good qualities in Europe.”

The libel suit also serves as a stereoscopic viewer for seeing New York's literary world in three-dimensional perspective, for this book is as much concerned with literary history as with journalism and biography. As literary history, this work reconstructs the contemporary situation and recalls from the wings the personalities that made such a profound impact upon Poe's life and career and lets them reenact their roles. As a study in journalism, it delves into many little-known and even forgotten journals of the time, a few of which are the Morning News, Morning Express, the two Mirrors, the Home Journal (New York papers), the Philadelphia Public Ledger, the Bostonian, the New Orleans Daily Picayune, the St. Louis Daily Reveille, and the Charleston Southern Patriot. The result shows how coteries were formed to defend or attack Poe and exposes the defamatory devices editors employed, even at the risk of being sued, whipped, or shot.

With its wealth of information, this book will take its place alongside Moss's Poe's Literary Battles: The Critic in the Context of His Literary Milieu (Duke University Press, 1963).

Sidney P. Moss, Professor of English at Southern Illinois University, is presently a Fulbright lecturer in American literature at University College, Dublin. He has written several books and published articles on Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson, Hemingway, and other American writers in a number of scholarly journals.

© 1970, Duke University Press

L.C.C. card no 74-100089

I.S.B.N. O-8223-0217-9

Printed in the United States of America by the Seeman Printery

For Abraham Golinkin

... let this be my Kaddish