The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30)

The 1840s were a period of great intellectual tumult, and Edgar Alan Poe “seems to have felt the era’s ups and downs more acutely than almost anyone,” said Henry Cowles in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

In John Tresch’s “splendid” new biography, the pioneering writer is revealed to have been a polymath whose enduring poetry and fiction are best understood in the context of his scientific ambitions. Poe wished to comprehend the entire universe, and in his time, such a goal invited zigzagging between astronomy and the occult. Tresch’s title refers to a scientific lecture, “Eureka,” that Poe gave just a year before his death at 40 and that he deemed his most greatest work. When it flopped, he spiraled downward. Then again, “the circumstances that made Poe’s life so hard to live help explain why it still captivates us.”

In “Eureka,” Poe described “a startling number of what would turn out to be prominent features of modern cosmology,” said Jeremy McCarter in The Wall Street Journal. The meandering lecture anticipated science’s later embrace of the Big Bang and the space-time continuum; it also championed ideas that were “ludicrously wrong.” But Tresch doesn’t worry about such stumbles. He uses Poe’s omnivorousness to justify zooming out to take in the full era, complete with portraits of scientific contemporaries Poe never knew. The tactic is “ambitious, sometimes overly so.” Still, Tresch provides enough on the sorrows Poe suffered—with finances, alcohol, and self-destructiveness— to leave a reader saddened.

Tresch’s main thesis “seems unarguable,” said Michael Dirda in The Washington Post. Poe was deeply enough engaged in scientific inquiry that his interests in that area shaped everything he wrote, including the stories that are foundational to detective fiction, science fiction, and gothic horror. But this book shouldn’t cause anyone to conclude that Poe became the most influential American writer of all time because of his commitment to rational inquest. “Ultimately, it is Poe’s other aspect, his ability to convey monomaniacal intensity, verging on hysteria, that we are drawn to.”