Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the work of countless Poe scholars and biographers, including those who came before and many whom I am fortunate to call friends. The heroic biographical work of Mary E. Phillips, Arthur Hobson Quinn, David K. Jackson, Dwight Thomas, and Kenneth Silverman gave The Man of the Crowd its foundation. Books such as The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman, Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race, edited by J. Gerald Kennedy and Liliane Weissberg, and Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses by Terence Whalen put Poe into meaningful conversation with nineteenth-century American culture, and I drew heavily from those volumes (among many others) in these pages. I am especially grateful to Jeffrey Savoye, who maintains the indispensible Poe Society of Baltimore website: eapoe.org. I learned about and accessed many of the historical texts cited in this book through the Poe Society website. In 2014, Philip Phillips invited me to Middle Tennessee State University to give a talk on Poe and Place; that visit, along with encouragement and advice from my colleague Joseph Kelly, got me moving on this project. Julia Eichelberger and Ellen Claire Lamb offered generous, helpful guidance on the manuscript and ongoing support. I would also like to acknowledge the journal Poe Studies, where some portions of chapter 4 previously appeared.

Michelle and I would also like to thank the College of Charleston for providing grants for this project on two occasions, and the English and Studio Art departments for additional support. Chris Semtner and Jaime Fawcett at the Poe Museum were unfailingly generous and helpful in our visits to Richmond. We are forever grateful to our tireless agent, Jacqueline Flynn, for getting us here; to Anne Savarese at Princeton University Press, for her guidance; and to Emily Shelton, for her careful editing. Finally, we would like to express our love and thanks to Nancy Peeples and Mark Sloan, who lived with this book for the past six years.