Even I have fallen for the cultural iconic portrait of Edgar Allen Poe: the raven haired, black eyed gentleman with the wan and somber face. The writer who penned macabre tales and whose detective set the precedent. The man whose love died young, forever in mourning.

Then I read several articles he had written. It was a whole ‘nuther voice, a man of rational and logical thought. And then I read a book about Poe as scientist. Wait! Who was this Poe? Do we even really know him?

The mystery of Poe’s life and death still baffles scholars and scientists. Poe was reported to be a self-possessed gentleman and a wild, illogical drunk. He married his beloved Sissy, his thirteen-year-old cousin whose mother embraced Eddy as a son. But what the true nature of their relationship was, we don’t really know.

We do know his life was haunted by tragedy. His parents were actors, and his father abandoned his family after his birth. His mother died of tuberculosis at age twenty-four. His brother died of alcohol related disease at age twenty-four. His beloved Virginia suffered from tuberculosis, dying at age twenty-four. Poe fell in love and was spurned before his marriage and after his wife’s death. He became famous and infamous but lived in poverty, always looking for the next big chance to make his mark. And he disappeared for days before found out of his mind, in some one else’s clothing, feverish and ill. He was buried even before his family was notified.

Early biographies and reports of his death can’t be trusted. We know he didn’t tolerate alcohol, but what medical conditions did he have that could have led to his death? Hair analysis doesn’t present an answer.

A Mystery of Mysteries gathers together a multitude of sources, trying to cobble together the truth. It’s entertaining and wide ranging. It will change your perception of Poe. Including learning that he had brown hair and light eyes, was slender and handsome and strong as a young cadet, and his wife wrote a poem for him.

I received a free egalley from the publisher though NegtGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

I almost didn't take this when I saw it on NetGalley, but I am glad to have read it. Lots of facts and research about Poe's life but also his death and last days. I have been a fan of Poe most of my life. He has been definitely misunderstood by many. The writer sheds some light on this cold case of Poe's death and I was fascinated.

Many thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with a digital copy to read for review. I highly recommend it if you are a Poe lover.

Mystery of Mysteries is an interesting and in depth biography on a man I am realizing we don’t truly know like we think we do, Edgar Allen Poe. While I had heard snippets of trivia about his life, I never saw beyond the caricature of the gloomy Gothic man we typically associate with Poe. Mark Dawidziak intricately goes through every possible detail of Poe’s life that can be known and talks to many experts about Poe’s life and his mysterious death. The impact Edgar Allen Poe has had on literature, poetic and prose style, critical reviews, and countless authors and artists is astounding. Like Daidziak asserts, Poe should get more credit for all his impacts in fields beyond Gothic and horror because his reach and style were so much more than what is typically remembered of him. I think this book is for literature, history, and Poe fans alike. It isn’t the fastest paced biography ever but it is rewarding to learn so much more about the mysterious Mr. Poe than one could ever bargain for.

I will admit that I am one of the many who bought into the myth of Poe, the dark, spooky, twisted and tortured man of horror fiction. I loved him for it and still do but with that said, I found A MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES refreshing and inspiring.

I loved reading about the other side of Poe and learning that he was not just this morose, serious man who hid away writing horror stories while drinking himself to oblivion.

He was funny, highly intelligent and agile if not athletic.

The mystery around his death remains, I was hoping for a breakthrough on that while reading this book but despite that disappointment, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. It was well-researched and well-written.

Thank you NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for this digital ARC

An interesting, and well written taken on the life of Poe before he became the larger than life legend.
Fresh insight into the things that drove him, and the demons that haunted him.

It did however, tease a promise of resolving some of the mystery surrounding Poe's death, and did not really deliver on that.

If you're a fan of Poe's works however, and want to know a bit more about the person himself, this book might interest you.

Absolutely thoroughly enjoyed learning so many things about Poe’s life! Highly recommend. I’ll probably read it again because surely I missed a few things.

biography, historical-figures, historical-places-events, historical-research, history-and-culture, history-trivia, unputdownable, cold-case*****

It's the tintinnabulation of the bells.
No getting away from the fact that Poe was a genius and that he had a genetical physical problem with alcohol. But the life and times of the man is often lost amid the myths. This author takes his whole life as a cold case and does meticulous due diligence complete with an exhaustive bibliography. It also points to the many writers, screenwriters, and actors who revere him as the Father Of their particular genre. Great read!
I requested and received an EARC from St. Martin's Press via NetGalley. Thank you so much!

I am fascinated by the life of Edgar Allen Poe. I was nice to get an unbiased, fact based account of who he was before he became the image icon we know today. Pale faced, mustache, frown, a man deep in substance abuse. These are the modern image of Edgar Allen Poe.

Mark Dawidziak has presented us with a book written in an engaging story that is accessible. While the facts of Poe's life and death are presented, the mystery of his death will probably never be solved. What really occurred in the days and weeks before his death have been lost. It is nice, however, to get to meet the real person that Edgar Allen Poe was.

Thank you NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the arc. This is my honest review.

What a fabulous book! Many people have the an image in their mind of Edgar Allen Poe: the morose man of pop culture--the pale face, the mustache, the frown. And the substance abuse.

But his story is deeper, and author Mark Dawidziak paints a much clearer picture of Poe and the betrayals he faced as he struggled with his demons. If nonfiction intimidates you, then be assured this will not: Dawidziak's writing is clear and accessible, and A Mystery of Mysteries reads much more like a novel than a textbook. This is definitely a book for literature fans--Poe in particular.

Thank you to St. Martin's Press for allowing me to read and review this book through NetGalley.

This was a very informative book about the life of Edgar Allan Poe. It told about his difficult childhood and his basically having no home life. Many of his stories could be tied in with what was going on in his life. He definitely loved his wife but her early death took a toll on him. The book gives a lot of facts and ideas, but leaves the readers to speculate on what really happened as with his death. Well written and not like a text book.

I was excited to read A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe to learn the “new light” Mark Dawidziak would share; while I appreciate the research that went into the work and the collaboration with other Poe scholars, unfortunately, there wasn’t any new insight. Readers, especially those of us who have read numerous biographies of Poe, are left with wading through a biography that merely recounts what other scholars have concluded. The author debunks the myth of the man but this also isn’t new information. I found the dual-timeline narrative an unnecessary addition.

Thanks NetGalley for the advanced copy of this fact filled biography. I learned much about the life and times of the talented, often misunderstood author. With a fabulous bibliography of sources the author provides an opportunity to use the tantalizing details to attempt to piece together Poe’s last days as well as the life that lead him to the catalog of poems and stories that delight us today.

Edgar Allan Poe’s bizarre death paralleled the dark and twisted things he wrote about. Though there have been many things written about his death and his life, here Mark Dawidziak shed some new light. Told in dual-timelines, a new theory emerges about his cause of death.

As a long time Poe fan, I found this to be a refreshing look at his life. He was always a writer I admired for his ability to write such dark and twisted things with such emotion behind it. I enjoyed this look at his life.

Thank you to St. Martin’s Press for the ARC! This book will release February 14th.

This review will be shared to my Instagram blog (@books_by_the_bottle) shortly 😊

It was incredibly difficult for me to read this piece of non-fiction, which purports on the surface to be an investigative look into the mysterious cause of Poe’s death and promises a sort of closed case on the matter, without viewing it through the lense of an educator grading a research paper. Having read Silverman’s biography already and all of Poe’s fiction, this book did not offer me much in the way of new information, though if anyone were to take up a new interest in reading about Poe, this biography, as short as it is, can provide a sort of introduction to basic facts about the writer.

To my significant disappointment, this book is very poorly composed. Much of the research relies heavily on what has already been written about Poe by previous biographers. I would expect a published work that touts itself as a “brilliant biography” to draw on primary sources and offer new insight from them, not glean snippets of observations from those who have already done so.

As to the form of the biography, I would not expect a paper written in the manner as this book is to be submitted as finished from an undergraduate university student, much less a published writer. Many quotes are dropped in the text without transitions or introductions, making for a very stilted reading experience. What’s worse, said quotes compose the majority of the content of the book, and it reads like a long string of copied and pasted direct quotes strung together by intermittent interjections of the author’s own writing. Additionally, some claims about Poe are placed very randomly in the middle of paragraphs with no evidence or sources. If this were handed in to me for a grade, I would promptly give it back and advise heavy revisions.

Lastly, the synopsis gives the impression that the biography will provide some new information about Poe’s cause of death by providing fresh insight about how he lived. While it does point out general misconceptions and falsities that have shaped popular belief about the writer (and are still being taught in many schools), it is not what it claims to be. It does not offer any new insight into Poe’s life (unless a reader had never read anything about Poe before). It does not give any new information about the death of Poe. All A Mystery of Mysteries really does is rehash what has already been written about Poe before. One cannot shed new light on something by using old light.

When most people hear the name Edgar Allan Poe, they immediately think of a grim and gaunt figure and the associated connotations - gloom, melancholy, madness, death and despair. The fact that most people are only familiar with his horror stories are partially responsible for this impression.

This biographical book focuses on EAP's final years leading up to his mysterious death, and sheds some light on his romantic relationships and friendships over the years. There was indeed some melancholy and even despair in Poe's life, but not to the extent that is generally believed. He experienced periods of great happiness and productivity in his life, often the times when some of his greatest work was produced. Of course he was also mercurial, querulous and needy - he made a number of enemies throughout his short life and some of them did their best to disparage his memory.

In 1849 he went missing for three days and when finally found, he was desperately ill and wearing someone else's tattered clothing. Deliriously feverish, he died in Baltimore at just 40 years of age.

The author attempts to put some clarity around these mysterious last days, and he does a reasonable job of providing a plausible explanation. He also shines a light on Poe's tragic losses, his need to be loved, struggle with alcohol and poverty and the series of friendships and enemies he made over his brief life and career. The author also wisely acknowledges that some of the mystery around EAP will never be solved and this mystique has helped him linger in the popular imagination for all these years. An excellent read - well-researched and fascinating. Many thanks to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for the copy to review.

This was a very detailed, exhaustive account of Edgar Allan Poe’s life & death, As a fan of his work, I enjoyed it. I had always liked Poe, and assumed I knew a little about him. But after reading this book, my biggest takeaway was how different Poe was in real life from his popular legend of a dark, tortured, spooky man. Apparently he was a little of that, but much more. Athletic, good humored, sharply intelligent, but also his own worst enemy and full of drama. There is still mystery surrounding his death & there always will be (best guess is died from tuberculosis or complications from it) but his life was pretty well documented & this was a fascinating, if perhaps overly detailed, read & I’d recommend it to any fan of literature.

I was not impressed with A Mystery of Mysteries by Mark Dawidziak. Poe was a predator and a nightmare to women. This will most likely be the last book I about him.

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. I can’t believe I’ve never read a book about Poe’s life. I’ve studied, read, and taught him for years. I also feel like I was super misinformed and shared this misinformation with my students. This book was a good one to read for someone who wanted to get a lot of info on his life and plausible theories of his death. Myths were debunked. Expert opinions were shared. All good stuff. The only thing I really didn’t like was that it flipped from way past to future and modern theories in a seemingly random way. I often started reading a section and got confused before figuring out when it was supposed to be taking place. Otherwise, excellently researched and presented. I feel like I got a lot of great factual info in this book.

This was clearly a thoroughly researched book. However, I was not a fan of the author’s writing style. The book jumps all over the place and I found that confusing. I would still encourage fans of Poe who want a thorough biography to give this book a try!

The book had a lot of interesting theories on Poes passing. A lot of interesting facts were provided. This book went into a lot of details on poes life he death still remains a mystery. Good book for anyone wanting to learn more about Poe