Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (1941), title page and table of contents

Notes:

Arthur Hobson Quinn (1875-1960) was a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. His particular interest was early American drama. He was dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the university, 1912-1922. (Quinn became a professor emeritus in 1945, although he continued to lecture and serve on various committees until his official retirement in 1954. He married Helen McKee in 1904. She died in 1962.)

The text for this electronic version of this book was initially prepared as HTML by Chris Aruffo. It has subsequently been revised for XHTML/CSS and to follow our own formatting preferences. Pagination has been added, and additional proofreading and correction has also been applied. As appropriate, clarifcations or updates to Quinn's text have been provided as notes at the bottom of each page by Jeffrey A. Savoye. One curious issue that has apparently escaped general notice is that the edition of 1941 contains a number of small but certain errors, which were corrected when the biography was reprinted in 1942. (The 1998 reprint by Johns Hopkins Press uses this corrected edition, although whether this was intentional or merely fortituous is not known as no comment to this effect is made on the copyright page or in the Foreword.) As an example, on pages 194 and 197, Quinn refers to the “Messenger contest” when he means the “Visiter contest.” All of the corrections from the later edition are present in the text provided here, with comments as appropriate at the end of each section. A sixth edition was reprinted by Appleton-Century-Croft in 1963.

In the original table of contents, the titles of the poems “To Helen” and “For Annie” are not given in quotation marks, an inconsistency that has been editorially adjusted in this presentation. Technically, the titles of books and magazines should be italicized rather than given in quotation marks, but that feature of this table of contents has been allowed to stand. (Indeed, in the individual chapters, the titles are given as italicized, and without quotation marks.)

In the original list of illustrations, a hyphen appears in “Marriage-Bond” for the illustration on page 23. As this word has been hyphenated no where else in the book, including the caption as it appears under the illustration itself, the hyphen is presumed to be a typographical error and has been removed here.