This story is excerpted and adapted from John Tresch’s The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Sci

Poe’s Best-Selling Book During His Lifetime Was a Guide to Seashells

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2021-05-28 15:30:23

This story is excerpted and adapted from John Tresch’s The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science, available June 15, 2021, from Farrar, Straus, Giroux.

Edgar A. Poe landed in Philadelphia in 1838. He had been raised among the elite of Richmond, Virginia, but in Philadelphia he was an impoverished outsider seeking recognition and stability as a professional writer. Strikingly, Poe’s first publication in Philadelphia—and the one that sold the most in his lifetime—was a scientific textbook.

When Poe arrived with his teenage wife (and first cousin) Virginia Clemm and her mother Maria, they were “literally suffering for want of food,” living on “bread and molasses for weeks together.” Poe’s friend James Pedder, well situated at a sugar manufacturer’s, purifying the raw goods delivered from Caribbean slave islands, came to their aid; his daughters, Bessie and Anna, visited with gifts for “Sissy” and “Muddy.” Pedder was also editor of The Farmers’ Cabinet, publicizing techniques for improving soils and raising crops—the kind of practical, commercially oriented publication in which much of the era’s natural science was reported and discussed. Pedder had studied the beet industry in France and was scheming to introduce beet sugar to the States.

Pedder helped Poe find odd jobs. His old friends in Baltimore, Nathan Brooks and Joseph Snodgrass, published his occasional pieces in The American Museum of Science, Literature, and the Arts. Hoping for a government post, in July 1838 Poe wrote to the novelist James Kirke Paulding, who had become Van Buren’s secretary of the navy; he longed to “obtain the most unimportant Clerkship in your gift—any thing, by sea or land.” No luck.

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