![]() ![]() He once said that ‘to revolutionise, at one effort, the universal world of human thought’ it was necessary only ‘to write and publish a very little book. A rain of blows descended on him from the time of his birth. His fate was heavy, his life all but insupportable. “Edgar Allan Poe has become the image of the poète maudit, the blasted soul, the wanderer. Turner and Newton now he turns his omnivorous attention to Edgar Allan Poe, about whom Ackroyd writes: Interspersing this banquet with a series of amuse-bouche bites, he has also produced a sequence of “Brief Lives.” Previous such studies concerned themselves with Chaucer, J.M.W. Ackroyd is the accomplished author of more than a dozen novels, two books of poetry and a half-dozen volumes of criticism and nonfiction - including “London: The Biography” and “Thames: The Biography.” As a chronicler of individuals rather than cities or rivers, he has offered up full-dress accounts of “Ezra Pound and his World,” “The Life of Thomas More,” “Shakespeare: The Biography,” as well as sizable biographies of Dickens, T.S. ![]() This is a man of letters from, as it were, A to Z. ![]() Peter Ackroyd is never less than instructive and, much of the time, incisive. ![]()
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