Scott Peeples's "The Man of the Crowd"

In 25 years at the College of Charleston, Scott Peeples has taught a wide array of courses, with topics ranging from Gothicism to nineteenth-century American poetry to Bob Dylan. He has published extensively on Edgar Allan Poe and other nineteenth-century writers, including (as co-editor) of The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe.

Peeples applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City, with photographs by Michelle Van Parys and reported the following:

On page 99, I’m discussing Poe’s story “The Man of the Crowd” in relation to the rise of the modern city. I’m focused on the moment when the story’s narrator, looking out the window of a coffeehouse, first sees the man and why he is fascinated by him.

It so happens that the book’s title is also The Man of the Crowd, and the book’s about 200 pages in length, so it makes sense that if you open it to the middle, you’ll find a discussion of the story for which the book is named. And this discussion is important --- crucial, even --- to the book’s main idea, which is that Poe’s life and work revolved around rapidly growing American cities. And yet, since I spend only about 3 ½ pages discussing “The Man of the Crowd,” it’s also kind of a coincidence that it should be there on page 99. More significantly: reading that page, you might think that most of the book consisted of analysis of Poe stories, but in fact, that’s something I do only occasionally --- maybe a fourth or a fifth of the book describes or interprets specific works. Most of it is focused on biography and description of the cities where Poe lived.

The book is essentially a biography focusing on the cities where Poe lived. The Man of the Crowd seemed like a good title, since I’m trying to counter the image of Poe as a man who was somehow separated from his place a time, a man who lived in a world of his own imagination. His story “The Man of the Crowd” is actually set in London, where Poe lived for several years as a boy --- but I believe it also reflects the American cities where he lived, especially Philadelphia (where he wrote it) and New York (where he would move a few years later). While Poe lived in rapidly growing cities for most of his life, he didn’t really love cities. The story “The Man of the Crowd” reflects a kind of urban paranoia common to the mid-nineteenth century.

Learn more about The Man of the Crowd at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue