In 1865 Boston, the literary geniuses of the Dante Club—poets and Harvard professors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, along with publisher J. T....
MATTHEW PEARL'S second novel is based on what he calls "one of literary history's most persistent gaps." Edgar Allan Poe died, Pearl tells us, "at the age of 40 in a Baltimore hospital on Oct. 7,...
