Poe & Fanny Book

In one tumultuous year, Edgar Allan Poe published "The Raven," was embraced by the New York literati, founded his own magazine, and had a dalliance with the renowned Frances Sargent Osgood. A married poetess and fellow member of New York's 1840s literati, beautiful Fanny Osgood was, in her time, as famous as her illicit lover. Although 1845 should have been the crowning year of Poe's life, by the end of it he was disgraced and reviled by the same capricious circles that had adored him.Much in the way Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White illuminates nineteenth-century London, John May brings New York's giddy pre-Civil War social scene into brilliant focus in this perfectly imagined novel of a doomed man and the great love that sealed his fate. At the end of 1845, Poe--a chronic alcoholic barely able to provide for his tubercular wife (his first cousin whom he married when she was thirteen)--left New York City a ruined man, deeply in debt, a virtual outcast spurned by the circle that included Horace Greeley, N. P. Willis, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Maria Child, and James Russell Lowell. He had wrecked two women's lives--his wife's and Fanny's. Even so, both loved him unremittingly to the bitter end. When he died at the age of forty, Poe left no children behind. Or did he? Poe & Fanny follows their story to its logical conclusion: that Fanny Osgood's third daughter was Edgar Allan Poe's. John May not only makes us see and believe the drama of these lives acted out against the backdrop of nineteenth-century New York's vibrant literary swirl, he makes us care.Read More