The popular Poe-- The Raven , Tell-Tale Heart , The Black Cat --has inspired a generation of readers long disenchanted with the normative tradition of American literature. But is the popular Poe--incessantly drinking, drug-addicted, and entranced by the terror of death--the real Poe? Harry Lee Poe contends that, for more than two centuries, the great myth of Edgar Allan Poe has damaged both the popular reader's understanding of Poe's corpus and the historian's depiction of Poe's life. Through reviewing his poems and short stories, literary criticism and science fiction, Evermore reveals a Poe who is deeply confounded by the existence of evil, the truth of justice, and even the problems of love, beauty, and God. Here Poe aficionados and casual appreciators of literature alike are invited into a greater understanding of Poe's most persistent questions and offered a novel approach to reading the American literary icon.