It’s not hard to imagine Edgar Allan Poe as obsessive. Consider his passionate poetry, his tales of horror barely tapping reality --not to mention his personal life: his ardent marriage to his cousin and his baffling death on the streets of Baltimore. But--manic about SCIENCE?

In his biography, historian John Tresch shows us a Poe who led his class at West Point in engineering and math, .. wrote about scientific discoveries and plunged into debates about evolution and the origin of the universe in an age when the line between science and quackery was a blur.

Tresch: “My goal is to reframe Poe’s life, and bring out this aspect of it --which is as central as it is neglected,-- which is his lifelong obsession with science.”

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