8 - The road to Literary America

Summary

The book itself is curious, being a collection of spleen, critical acumen, excellent writing, brilliant metaphor, and poetical association seldom found together in the same pages.

–Thomas Powell, reviewing Poe's Literati (1850)

Besides founding and editing a first-class magazine, Edgar Allan Poe's other great ambition during the last decade of his life was to write a book-length survey of American literature. He partially realized the project in his series of periodical essays, “The Literati of New York City,” but he never brought the whole thing to completion. Poe conceived the work over a period of several years. His early reading started him thinking about literary history and reminiscences. His chirographic analysis allowed him to indulge in literary gossip and personal criticism. Even after he decided to write a book-length work about American literature, the project changed course several times, but the various approaches coalesced, and Poe's last conception of the work combined biography, personal criticism, and literary analysis. The last title he came up with was Literary America. The earlier titles he imagined indicate the different directions taken by the project.

Poe's interest in literary history can be traced at least as far back as 1826, the year he spent at the University of Virginia where his attention to both history and literature may have given him the idea of writing a literary history. The University library allowed him the opportunity to read systematically, as his attention to history-reading indicates.