The Reason for the Darkness of the Night

Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science

John Tresch

Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2021

Hb, 448pp, £21.20, ISBN 9780374247850

This study, with its slightly cumbersome title, is structured as a biography of the writer Edgar Allan Poe, but with a strong emphasis on Poe’s interactions with the scientific revolutions that took place in America during his short life (1809-49).

John Tresch is an historian of science at the Warburg Institute in London, so brings a detailed knowledge of the scientific and technical advances of the era into conjunction with the grotesqueries of Poe’s Gothic imagination. This