The popular Poe--The Raven, Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat--has inspired a generation of readers long disenchanted with the normative tradition of American literature. But is the popular Poe--incessantly drinking, drug-addicted, and entranced by the terror of death--the real Poe? Harry Lee Poe contends that, for more than two centuries, the great myth of Edgar Allan Poe has damaged both the popular reader's understanding of Poe's corpus and the historian's...