Edgar Allan Poe

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First Publication

Published by Martin Secker, in October 1910.

Availability

Out of print.

Background

Ransome edited Stories by Edgar Allan Poe as the third volume in The World’s Story-tellers series, in 1909. It led to a commission from Martin Secker to write a complete book on Poe. Ransome worked on his manuscript in the winter, spring and summer of 1910, with Ransome continuing his “bad habit of sending books to the printer piecemeal“. He had good reasons for his slow progress: his marriage to Ivy Walker in March 1909 was aleady becoming stressful; his daugher Taqbitha was born on May 9, 1910 and, in August 1910, he “rediscovered the pleasure I had known as a small boy watching a perch-float” when his postman persuaded him to try fishing for the first time since his father’s death.

Upon completion he went to the Lakes to begin work on another book for Secker, this time on roads and walking. By now Ransome “owned a small, light-weight tent that would stow in a knapsack“, which he set up in the Collingwood’s garden at Lanehead, Coniston. Later he moved to camp on Peel Island, where W G Collingwood’s third daugher, Ursula, delivered the proofs of Edgar Allan Poe by swimming to the island with the papers tied to her head.