Timothy Donovan Lecture: Edgar Allan Poe and the Art of Self-Destruction

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Stephen Berry, the Amanda and Greg Gregory Professor of the Civil War Era at the University of Georgia

Fayetteville, Ark. – Stephen Berry, the Amanda and Greg Gregory Professor of the Civil War Era at the University of Georgia, will present "Drinking Yourself to Death in the Grand Age of Temperance: Edgar Allan Poe and the Art of Self-Destruction" as the 2012-13 Timothy Donovan Lecturer at 6 p.m. Monday, March 4, in Giffels Auditorium in Old Main.

Berry, a 19th century American historian, argues that Poe’s biographers, unable to resist the temptation of a murder-mystery ending, have variously finished him off with a death by murder, heart disease, tuberculosis, epilepsy, syphilis, cholera, rabies, and cooping (the practice of forcing someone to drink and vote repeatedly). To Berry, this is all ridiculous. Poe killed Poe, and he did it with alcohol. Berry will discuss the causes and effects of Poe's drinking, the way it was exposed and pilloried in the temperance press, and how the attempt to bury him in ignominy ironically secured his immortality.

This lecture draws from Professor Berry’s current book project, Jingle-Man:  The Death and Times of Edgar Allan Poe.  He has previously published two monographs House of Abraham:  Lincoln and the Todds, A Family Divided by War (Houghton Mifflin, 2007) and All That Makes a Man:  Love and Ambition in the Civil War South (Oxford, 2003) as well as two edited collections, Weirding the War:  Stories from the Civil War’s Ragged Edges (Georgia, 2011) and Princes of Cotton:  Four Diaries of Young Men in the South, 1848-1860 (Georgia and Southern Texts Society, 2007).

The Donovan Lecture Series is named in honor of Timothy Donovan, former professor and chair of the department of history at the University of Arkansas, and has brought leading historians to campus.  This event is co-sponsored by the department of history in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences.