If you grew up in a rural area, you have seen how farmhouses come and go, but the dent left by cellars is permanent. There is something unbreakable in that hand-dug foundational gouge into the earth....
But this much is known: Hamilton shot into the trees. Burr, leveling his pistol at his foe, did not.
Whether the world at large recognized him or his work, something had changed inside the shifting identity of the fugitive Edgar Allan Poe—something irrevocable. He was an author now.
This backward construction was an authorial slight of hand that Poe understood well. Pondering what he called tales of ratiocination—his own name for detective stories—Poe later remarked, People think...
It is a telling commentary on how authors control what they write, but not what is read. Poe regarded his tales of ratiocination as something of a distraction; his great loves were poetry and his pros...
And yet something unsettling remained about the notion of John Pastano as a willful murderer: the recollection, perhaps, that after murdering Mary Castro, he had filled his hat with her blood and wand...
Napoléon Bonaparte. The new leader had no immediate fight to pick with America; some thought he might actually bring peace to Europe. Hamilton’s endless demands for more funding and troops were beginn...
Historically, dust jackets are a new concern for authors; you don't see them much before the 1920s. And is a strange name for this contrivance, as if books had anything to fear from dust. If you stor...
Back then, Manhattan was the infant country
…I had a good title already. My book was originally called Loser: A Brief History of Notable Failures. But American publishers don’t like this. Losing is a bad thing in our country. It’s not allowed.
William pondered what his next discovery might be. He knew that readers were vexed by the possibility that their Bard might have been Catholic. There is, after all, that suspicious reference to Purgat...
Positive and direct proof of fraud is not to be expected.… The nature of the thing itself, which is generally carried out in a secret and clandestine manner, does not admit of any but circumstantial e...
On the morning of his funeral, the Baltimore Sun failed to announce the service, but mourned that his death will cause poignant regret among all who admire genius, and have sympathy for the frailties...
It really is an APPALLING thing to think of the people who have no books...It is only by books that most men and women can lift themselves above the sordidness of life. No books! Yet for the greater p...
If every man who wrote a story which was indirectly inspired by Poe were to pay a tithe towards a monument, Doyle later mused, it would be such as would dwarf the pyramids.
I noticed you made a bee-line for their bookcases. It is the oldest and most incorrigible trait of the book-lover.
How can we expect that the illiterate and benighted child of want will remain faithful . . . when he in whose breast the lamp of science brightly burns is found derelict?
Coffee biggins—the last being the latest fad from France, involving the boiling of coffee rather than merely drinking it as a dissolved
Put the penis schematic away, he told the coroner.
New York was the swing state in the upcoming presidential election—and Manhattan was the swing district in New York State. Control the city, and you controlled the 1800 presidential race.