Poe & Fanny

Author:

There wasn’t much I could find online about John May, but he was born in Burlington, North Carolina and studied at the University of North Carolina and Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont. It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that at least two other well known writers, Donna Tartt and Brett Easton Ellis, also studied writing at Bennington College. Additionally, John May was the CEO of a textile company and still lives (at least whenever the article was written) in North Carolina. I also found that he could be in his 90s, so it seems fitting that there isn’t a lot of information about him online.

Learn More about John May

Three words to describe this read:

Fictional- The story is by no means proven, but it does give the reader an idea of what may have happened between Edgar Allan Poe and Fanny Osgood. It’s also a picture of Poe’s daily activities and the struggles that he faced.

Doomed- It was always difficult to imagine where the story was headed. Regardless of what the readers want for Edgar, his family, or Fanny, you already know how the stories will end..

Lively- There are a lot of characters to meet and the narration takes different perspectives which gives great insight into the elite and poor of New York City in the 1840s.

Quote:

“Amazed by how many ways he could find to say essentially the same thing, he tried to vary the structure, but almost always it came down to the same message: ’Hurry back; life is dreadful without you.’”

This is my favorite quote because it describes the entire dilemma of writing. You know that you are trying to make a point that has already been made a million times, likely by someone better and more famous than you, but you write it anyway because you have to.