The Reason for the Darkness of the Night

Poe's Forgotten Legacy: The Acclaimed Author's Lifelong Obsession with Science
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize | Finalist for the 2022 Edgar Award
Winner of the 2021 Quinn Award
Decade after decade, Edgar Allan Poe remains one of the most popular American writers, beloved around the world for his pioneering detective fiction, tales of horror, and haunting, atmospheric verse. But in The Reason for the Darkness of the Night, John Tresch unveils another side to the man who wrote "The Raven" and "The Fall of the House of Usher".
Shining a spotlight on an era when the lines separating entertainment, speculation, and scientific inquiry were blurred, Tresch reveals Poe's obsession with science and lifelong ambition to advance and question human knowledge. Even as he composed dazzling works of fiction, Poe remained an avid and often combative commentator on new discoveries, publishing and hustling in literary scenes that also hosted the era's most prominent scientists, semi-scientists, and pseudo-intellectual rogues.
Taking us through Poe's early training in mathematics and engineering at West Point and the tumultuous years that followed, Tresch shows that Poe lived, thought, and suffered surrounded by science—and that many of his most renowned and imaginative works can best be understood in its company. Pursuing extraordinary conjectures and a unique aesthetic vision, Poe remained a figure of explosive contradiction: he gleefully exposed the hoaxes of the era's scientific fraudsters even as he perpetrated hoaxes himself.
The Reason for the Darkness of the Night is an essential new portrait of a writer whose life is synonymous with mystery and imagination—and an entertaining, erudite tour of the world of American science just as it was beginning to come into its own.