ISRAFEL Hervey Allen Farrar & Rinehart ($3.50).
EDGAR ALLAN POE Una Pope-Hennessy Macmillan ($4).
If a U. S. citizen were asked to name the greatest U. S. writer of the 19th Century, he would be apt to choose, according to his literary politics, Herman Melville, Mark Twain or Walt Whitman. But a European would probably name Edgar Allan Poe. Like Melville and Whitman, Poe was not recognized by the U. S. as a great writer until Europe had guaranteed his genius. Says Biographer Pope-Hennessy: "He has been claimed as the founder of the 'Surrealiste' school, and in his unusual mind French symbolists have found inspiration for poems, Maeterlinck suggestions for dream-dramas, Jules'Verne a model for the quasi-scientific narrative of adventure, R. L. Stevenson the source for the pirate story, and Conan Doyle the pattern for detective fiction. . . . Mallarme and Valery, not to speak of Baudelaire, have recognized Poe as their master in aesthetics."
U. S. readers to whom Poe is still a mistily mysterious figure will find in either of these biographies a straightforward, authoritative account of his tragic life. Author Hervey Allen's Israjel, originally published (1926) in two volumes, is generally regarded as the standard life of Poe. For a thoroughgoing, impartial but humane portrait, complete with all relevant details of background, Israjel gives the reader all he either desires or deserves to know.
Edgar Poe (1809-1849) was born in Boston, the second child of second-rate strolling players. His elder brother, William Henry Leonard, died at 24 of tuberculosis aggravated by drink; his sister Rosalie never developed mentally after adolescence. Edgar's mother died in Richmond, Va. when he was three, and he and his infant sister were adopted (though never legally) by kind-hearted Richmond families. Poe adored his foster-mother, Mrs. Allan, but never got along with his "Pa." Though he was brought up as a little Virginia gentleman, he soon ceased to conform. Tragedy visited him early and often, did nothing to thicken an already abnormally thin skin. At 15 he had his second bereavement, when an older woman whom he worshipped died insane. Always romantically attached to some woman, Poe was engaged to be married when he went to the University of Virginia. There he learned to drink but not how to hold his liquor: "One glass was literally too much." Because he gambled himself into debt his foster-father ignominiously removed him. Poe got home to find that his fiancee was promised to another.