American Antiquarian Society
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Join us in person or virtually to hear biographers Richard Kopley and Megan Marshall discuss their most recent publications, followed by the authors in conversation.
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.
His newest book Edgar Allan Poe: A Life (2025), 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. 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.
Megan Marshall is Charles Wesley Emerson College Professor, emerita, 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.
In her new book, After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart (2025), Marshall turns her narrative gift to her own art, life, and the people in it. In each of six essays, Marshall reinvents the personal essay form, as a portal to the past and its lessons for living into the future. The book’s brilliant, assured interplay between memoir and biography places surprising characters on the page, including the twelfth-century Buddhist hermit Kamo no Chomei, a reassuring spiritual presence for Marshall during several otherwise deracinating months in Kyoto. In her stunning coming-of-age tale, “Free for a While,” set in 1970s California, Marshall interweaves the story of her adolescence with that of Black Power martyr Jonathan Jackson. The author’s high school AP history classmate, Jackson was gunned down at seventeen in a failed attempt to free his famed older brother George from prison--a case that put Angela Davis on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.
Photo credit: Corinne Elicone.