This story is excerpted and adapted from John Tresch’s The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science, available June 15, 2021, from Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Edgar A. Poe landed in Philadelphia in 1838. He had been raised among the elite of Richmond, Virginia, but in Philadelphia he was an impoverished outsider seeking recognition and stability as a professional writer. Strikingly, Poe’s first publication in Philadelphia—and the one that sold the most in his lifetime—was a scientific textbook. When Poe arrived with…
