Jeffrey Meyers

Edgar Allan Poe, whose personal torment so powerfully informed his visionary prose and poetry, is a towering figure in the history of American literature. The archetype of the suffering artist, he lived from one extreme to the other: he knew fame and obscurity, wealth and destitution, and the loss of everything he cherished. His fevered imagination brought him to great heights of creativity and the depths of paranoiac despair. Yet although he produced...

This riveting biography, by a master of the genre, gives a radically new interpretation of Robert Frost both as man and poet. Meyers explores Frost's troubled relations with his wife, Elinor, and his Job-like family life. Two of his children died in infancy, one died in childbirth, one became insane, and one killed himself. These tragedies were reflected in his terrifying art. The Frost that emerges from this biography is neither the hayseed sage...