American Antiquarian Society
185 Salisbury Street
Worcester, MA 01609
United States
Join us in person or virtually to hear biographer Richard Kopley discuss his new book Edgar Allan Poe: A Life (2025). Edgar Allan Poe: A Life is the most comprehensive critical biography of Poe yet produced, exploring his fascinating life, his extraordinary work, and the vital relationship between the two. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre found in such works as “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” this legendary American author continues to intrigue and enthrall his devoted readers. Written by one of the world’s leading Poe experts, this biography is a rich and rewarding study for the general reader as well as for the seasoned scholar. Richard Kopley combines a biographical narrative of Poe’s enduring challenges—including his difficult foster father, his personal losses, his great struggles with depression and alcoholism, and the poverty that dogged his existence—with close readings of his work that focus not only on plot, character, and theme but also on language, allusion, and structure in a way that enhances our understanding of both. While incorporating past Poe scholarship, this volume also relates unknown stories of Poe culled from privately held letters unavailable to previous biographers, presenting a range of groundbreaking archival discoveries that illuminate the man and his oeuvre in ways never before possible.
This presentation will be followed by a conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and AAS Member, Megan Marshall.
Richard Kopley is distinguished professor of English, emeritus, at Penn State DuBois, and the author of The Threads of The Scarlet Letter, Edgar Allan Poe and the Dupin Mysteries, and The Formal Center in Literature--Explorations from Poe to the Present. Kopley has been a Fulbright Specialist and a Virginia Humanities Fellow. In 2018, he received a Lifetime Achievement and Service Award from the Poe Studies Association.
Megan Marshall is an associate professor of nonfiction writing at Emerson College. Her writings have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Book Review, Slate, and the London Review of Books. Her first biography, The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (2005), won the Francis Parkman Prize and the Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction. Her book, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Biography in 2014. Marshall was elected to AAS membership in May 2014.
Photo credit: Corinne Elicone.