What is some of the authors that lived during poe's life and might to have talked with poe?? Also I need a representation of what life was like in the United States during his lifetime??? Thanks write back ASAP

-- Anonymous, October 06, 2002

Answers

Try surfing at www.eapo.org through Poe's own articles on his contemporaries and his correspondence with them. His closer aacquaintances may not be as famous as Longfellow, Emerson, Cooper or Hawthorne. He was a friend of Lowell until a falling out over a literary joke. Henry Hirst and other minor poets were closer friends, Sarah Whitman. Walt Whitman as a boy was very impressed with the dark romantic persona of Poe in the publishing offices of New York. Dickens supposedly had a meeting with Poe on his American tour.

You have to dig for life in those times. Poe got around, had some schooling the Britain, lived both North and South in the big cities in a time of rapid progress, relative peace. Post-revolutionary, pre-civil war Amemrica, building its own identity and expanding its boudaries.

-- Anonymous, October 07, 2002

Mr Murphy's suggestions are, as always, exellent. If you want another (paper - book) easy and sure way, as alternative or complement, try to get the opulent "Poe Log" by Thomas & Jackson (1987, 1991...), with its index giving all personalities Poe was acquainted with, in any manner or time. A mine of reliable informations, I assure you, and, strangely, too often overlooked or ignored...! Yours sincerely, Raven's Shade (Belgium).

-- Anonymous, October 08, 2002