{"id":1314,"date":"2009-01-20T14:40:35","date_gmt":"2009-01-20T21:40:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2009\/01\/crazed-and-broke-and-very-much-alone\/"},"modified":"2009-01-20T14:41:36","modified_gmt":"2009-01-20T21:41:36","slug":"crazed-and-broke-and-very-much-alone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2009\/01\/20\/crazed-and-broke-and-very-much-alone\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Crazed and broke and very much alone.&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"Apple-style-span\" style=\"font-style: italic\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.observer.com\/2009\/o2\/books\/our-critics-tip-sheet-current-reading-peter-ackroyd-briefly-resurrects-edgar-allan-poe\" target=\"_blank\">from The New York Observer<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<h1>Our Critic&#8217;s Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Peter Ackroyd Briefly Resurrects Edgar Allan Poe, Birthday Boy<\/h1>\n<p><span class=\"Apple-style-span\" style=\"color: #6d6d6d; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10px; line-height: 14px; text-transform: uppercase\"><span class=\"article-author\" style=\"font-style: normal; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px\"><span class=\"article-by\" style=\"font-weight: normal\">BY<\/span>\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.observer.com\/node\/36002\" style=\"text-decoration: none; color: #003687\" target=\"_blank\">ADAM BEGLEY<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0|\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<span class=\"article-date\" style=\"margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; display: inline; margin-right: 3px; color: #6d6d6d\">2:59 PM JANUARY 19, 2009<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1em; padding-left: 0px; margin: 0px\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.observer.com\/files\/imagecache\/vertical\/files\/Edgar%20Allan%20Poe.jpg\" border=\"0\" hspace=\"15\" width=\"250\" height=\"348\" align=\"right\" \/>Grim is the only way to begin the story of Edgar Allan Poe, who was born 200 years ago this week; grim is the only way to end it. In between there\u2019s poverty, drunken sprees, illness, dashed hopes, more drunkenness and a messy heap of bad behavior (Hemingway, operating on the two-birds-one-stone principle, once remarked that Faulkner was \u201calmost as much of a prick as Poe\u201d). And yet Poe managed to produce a body of work that\u2019s frankly amazing and heroically perverse (the painter Robert Motherwell once called him \u201ca one-man modernist\u201d). The gothic tales and the poems (especially \u201cThe Raven\u201d) made him briefly semi-famous, but never eased his financial misery. Born poor and swiftly orphaned, Poe died at the age of 40, crazed and broke and very much alone.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1em; padding-left: 0px; margin: 0px\">Right on time for his bicentennial comes Peter Ackroyd\u2019s biography,\u00a0<em>Poe: A Life Cut Short<\/em>(Nan A. Talese\/Doubleday, $21.95).\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>[ <a href=\"http:\/\/www.observer.com\/2009\/o2\/books\/our-critics-tip-sheet-current-reading-peter-ackroyd-briefly-resurrects-edgar-allan-poe\" target=\"_blank\">click to continue reading at Observer.com<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>from The New York Observer Our Critic&#8217;s Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Peter Ackroyd Briefly Resurrects Edgar Allan Poe, Birthday Boy BY\u00a0ADAM BEGLEY\u00a0\u00a0|\u00a0\u00a02:59 PM JANUARY 19, 2009 Grim is the only way to begin the story of Edgar Allan Poe, who was born 200 years ago this week; grim is the only way to end [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1314\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}