Edgar Allan Poe and His Nineteenth-Century American Counterparts

John Cullen Gruesser is Senior Research Scholar of Literary Studies at Sam Houston State University, USA. He is the author or editor of ten books and a past President of the Poe Studies Association.

• Introduction: Dreams and Mystifications of PoePart I: The Quixotic Quest for Literary Fame, Financial Stability, and a Republic of Letters in Antebellum America1: Poor Edgar's Almanac: E. A. Poe's Money Woes 2: Outside Looking In: Poe and New York City3: Eddy P., the Scrivener: Biography and Autobiography in Herman Melville's "Story of Wall-Street"Part II: The Competition in Cunning: Ramifications of and Responses to Poe's Ratiocinative Tales4: Character Rivalry, Authorial Sleight-of-Hand, and Generic Fluidity in the Dupin Trilogy 5: Varieties of Detection in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Walt Whitman's Life and Adventures of Jack Engle, Herman Melville's Benito Cereno, and Mark Twain's "The Stolen White Elephant"6: Madness, Mystification, and "Average Racism" in "The Gold-Bug," E. D. E. N. Southworth's The Hidden Hand, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Pauline Hopkins's Hagar's DaughterCoda: "A Crime of Dark Dye": Misreading Poe's CriticismNotesIndex

A smart, crisply written, and engaging study … The book will be useful not just for students of Poe and nineteenth-century publishing but also for teachers looking to weave Poe into their US literature offerings in news ways … Gruesser shows how central he was to a striking variety of writers publishing in the decades after his death.