Edgar Allan Poe
The Fever Called Living (Icons)
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Narrated by:
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Grover Gardner
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By:
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Paul Collins
About this listen
A view into the tumultuous and creative life of Edgar Allan Poe.
Today the name Edgar Allan Poe invokes a tragic genius whose mastery of horror seems inexorably tied to his tormented life. But in his own time, Poe was above all a craftsman-an editor and reviewer desperately trying to earn a living by transmuting the wild ephemera of early Victorianism into innovations in science fiction, horror, and detective literature. Indeed, the crime thriller would not exist without Poe's sleuth Dupin, the deductive genius of "Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter."
With brilliant scholarship and storytelling verve, Paul Collins delves into Poe's life and his professional world, from his stormy relationship with his rich adoptive father and interest in cryptograms to hits such as "The Raven" and flops like Eureka, his late-career crank literature outing. Edgar Allan Poe is an informative and supremely entertaining account of one of the most singular talents in American letters.
©2014 Paul Collins (P)2014 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.Listeners also enjoyed...
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- How the Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures
- By: Maureen Corrigan
- Narrated by: Maureen Corrigan
- Length: 10 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Conceived nearly a century ago by a man who died believing himself a failure, it's now a revered classic and a rite of passage in the reading lives of millions. But how well do we really know The Great Gatsby? As Maureen Corrigan, Gatsby lover extraordinaire, points out, while Fitzgerald's masterpiece may be one of the most popular novels in America, many of us first read it when we were too young to fully comprehend its power.
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Reading Gatsby as an adult reveals its greatness!
- By Mark on 10-06-14
By: Maureen Corrigan
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Georgette Heyer
- Biography of a Bestseller
- By: Jennifer Kloester
- Narrated by: Phyllida Nash
- Length: 14 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Georgette Heyer remains an enduring international best seller, read and loved by four generations of readers and extolled by today's best-selling authors. Despite her enormous popularity, she never gave an interview or appeared in public. Georgette Heyer wrote her first novel, The Black Moth, when she was 17 in order to amuse her convalescent brother. It was published in 1921 to instant success, and 90 years later it has never been out of print.
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Heyer as a person
- By Jerri C on 06-15-15
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Keats
- A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph
- By: Lucasta Miller
- Narrated by: Sally Scott
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Miller, through Keats’s poetry, brilliantly resurrects and brings vividly to life, the man, the poet in all his complexity and spirit, living dangerously, disdaining respectability and cultural norms, and embracing subversive politics. Keats was a lower-middle-class outsider from a tragic and fractured family, whose extraordinary energy and love of language allowed him to pummel his way into the heart of English literature; a freethinker and a liberal at a time of repression, who delighted in the sensation of the moment.
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A Romantic Life
- By David on 05-03-22
By: Lucasta Miller
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Butterfly in the Typewriter
- The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of a Confederacy of Dunces
- By: Cory MacLauchlin
- Narrated by: Nick Sullivan
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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The saga of John Kennedy Toole is one of the greatest stories of American literary history. In Butterfly in the Typewriter, Cory MacLauchlin draws on scores of new interviews with friends, family, and colleagues as well as full access to the extensive Toole archive at Tulane University, capturing his upbringing in New Orleans, his years in New York City, his frenzy of writing in Puerto Rico, his return to his beloved city, and his descent into paranoia and depression.
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Worth it! Good biography. Informative.
- By French Quarter on 07-09-13
By: Cory MacLauchlin
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The Professor and the Madman
- By: Simon Winchester
- Narrated by: Simon Winchester
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Part history, part true-crime, and entirely entertaining, listen to the story of how the behemoth Oxford English Dictionary was made. You'll hang on every word as you discover that the dictionary's greatest contributor was also an insane murderer working from the confines of an asylum.
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Perfect example of a quality audible book.
- By Jerry on 07-07-03
By: Simon Winchester
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The Fellowship
- The Literary LIves of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams
- By: Philip Zaleski, Carol Zaleski
- Narrated by: John Curless
- Length: 26 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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C. S. Lewis is the 20th century's most widely read Christian writer and J. R. R. Tolkien its most beloved mythmaker. For three decades they and their closest associates formed a literary club known as the Inklings, which met weekly in Lewis' Oxford rooms and a nearby pub. They read aloud from works in progress, argued about anything that caught their fancy, and gave one another invaluable companionship, inspiration, and criticism.
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If You Love Literature...
- By Ray M on 07-14-16
By: Philip Zaleski, and others
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The Voice is All
- The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac
- By: Joyce Johnson
- Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie
- Length: 16 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Voice Is All, Joyce Johnson - coauthor of the classic memoir Door Wide Open, about her relationship with Jack Kerouac - brilliantly peels away layers of the Kerouac legend to show how, caught between two cultures and two languages, he forged a voice to contain his dualities. Looking more deeply than previous biographers into how Kerouac's French Canadian background enriched his prose and gave him a unique outsider's vision of America, she tracks his development from boyhood through the phenomenal breakthroughs of 1951 that resulted in the composition of On the Road.
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Kerouac's Voice
- By Robert L. Stofel on 09-26-12
By: Joyce Johnson
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I Am Dynamite!
- A Life of Nietzsche
- By: Sue Prideaux
- Narrated by: Nicholas Guy Smith
- Length: 17 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Nietzsche wrote that all philosophy is autobiographical, and in this vividly compelling, myth-shattering biography, Sue Prideaux brings listeners into the world of this brilliant, eccentric, and deeply troubled man, illuminating the events and people that shaped his life and work. I Am Dynamite! is the essential biography for anyone seeking to understand history's most misunderstood philosopher.
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Fascinating; tragic
- By Cineaste21 on 12-30-18
By: Sue Prideaux
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Romantic Outlaws
- The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley
- By: Charlotte Gordon
- Narrated by: Susan Lyons
- Length: 22 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Charlotte Gordon's new work is a fresh look at the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, who together comprise one of the most illustrious and inspiring mother-daughter pairs in history.
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Tons of info, poor format choice.
- By Gotta Tellya on 02-06-17
By: Charlotte Gordon
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Ted Hughes
- The Unauthorized Life
- By: Jonathan Bate
- Narrated by: Mike Grady
- Length: 25 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Ted Hughes, poet laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. With an equal gift for poetry and prose, and with a soul as capacious as any poet in history, he was also a prolific children's writer and has been hailed as the greatest English letter writer since John Keats. His magnetic personality and insatiable appetite for friendship, love, and life also attracted more scandal than any poet since Lord Byron.
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Phenomenal thanks to narrator!
- By equinox14 on 06-26-16
By: Jonathan Bate
What listeners say about Edgar Allan Poe
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- richard burr
- 01-09-18
Very informative and entertaining
Highly recommend the Audible version. This is a unique and special work by very talented people.
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- Abram
- 09-14-15
A fine short biography
This short read is a terrific introduction to Poe's life and work. It captures the failures and successes achieved by Poe during his short, troubled 40 years, and is narrated by one of the most professional readers in the audio books world. The one problem with an introductory biography in an audio format is that without the physical copy and footnotes, you are prevented from consulting other works relied upon by the author. But with Poe this is a minor issue because the next step for the listener is not another bio but Poe's own work, prose or poetry, and these are widely available in one volume editions at any bookstore.
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- Tom
- 05-08-24
A troubling biography of a troubled Genius.
Collins provides us with a very carefully detailed of Poe’s evolution from an often troubled childhood to a mercurial career writing Poems and Iconic Mysteries. For any fan of his work this may be painful to read but it goes a long way to explaining the blackness of his imagination as well as the alternating fortunes of his tales.
Aside from having read The Raven, Annabel Lee and some of his Noir tales, I really didn’t know much about Poe, the Man, and this bio definitely filled in the blanks. It’s unfortunate that, like so many of our Artistic icons, his work only achieved recognition after his death and ignominious burial. I can go back now and read his stories and poems with a more appreciative eye. Four Stars. ****
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- Amazon Customer
- 08-06-18
Good Short Introductory Biography
Enjoyed this short book more than I expected. I especially liked the discussions of Poe's literary styles and their development, but I can understand why people would expect relatively more biographical content. The content and flow and narrator reminded me of a good TV documentary. Doesn't go deep but overall a good brief intro to Poe's life, at least for me.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Colorfulspinner
- 01-15-16
TheFever Called Living
interesting observations on a depressed genius who was underappreciated in his own time. The narration was extremely well done.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Darwin8u
- 06-17-20
Poe's Imp
"He was at all times a dreamer--dwelling in ideal realms--in heaven or hell--peopled with creatures and the accidents of his brain."
- Rev. Rufus Griswold, quoted in Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living
A solid introduction/biography of Edgar Allen Poe. I've been fascinated with Poe since being a kid in Utah, and later Virginia and a young adult in Richmond. I adore his short stories, like his poetry, and have mostly, lazily avoided his other writings. Perhaps, it is time to try to read all of his stuff. Collins does a solid job of tracing the life and literary history of Poe. I was fascinated by his relationship with other authors and editors. Collins does a good job of placing Poe in his time, but not burying Poe in his age. Grover Gardner, as always, is a master of his craft.
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7 people found this helpful
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- Russell Bernard
- 03-13-19
Worth it
Grover Gardner is a wonderful narrator. Paul brings this story to life. If only there were copyright laws during his life Poe would been a rock star and lived longer to write many more mystery stories.
What a wonderful thought.
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1 person found this helpful
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- B Hart
- 08-03-15
Very good but wanted more.
This is a good, succinct view of Poe's life. I did enjoy it just wanted more about him. I'm usually complaining when a book is way too long, but in this case I would like it to have been longer.
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- Opera Lover
- 12-12-22
Great concise biography
Loved Gardner’s narrative and the rhythm oh his storytelling. Nice sampling of Poe’s writings. Concise but informative biography.
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