Kenneth Silverman (1936–2017)

Dr. Kenneth Silverman, best known in the Poe world for his biography Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance (1991), died on July 7, 2017, at the age of eighty-one. Dr. Silverman was professor of English at New York University and, according to Harrison Smith, who wrote Silverman's obituary for the Washington Post, Professor Silverman was "a practicing magician on the stage and on the page, where he made the act of describing a person's life in all its knotty complexity appear almost effortless" (Harrison, Washington Post, July 11). He is survived by his partner of thirty-four years, Jane Mallison; his daughter, Dr. Willa Silverman, Penn State's Malvin E. and Lea P. Bank Professor of French and Jewish Studies; his son, Ethan Silverman; and three grandchildren.

Photo by Elena Seibert.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his biography The Life and Times of Cotton Mather (1984), Dr. Silverman also published three other biographies: Houdini!!! The Career of Ehrich Weiss, American Self-Liberator, Europe's Eclipsing Sensation, World's Handcuff King and Prison Breaker—Nothing on Earth Can Hold Houdini a Prisoner!!! (1997), Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse (2003), and Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage (2010). His first book, Colonial American Poetry (1968), has been praised for its clarity and comprehensiveness.

According to Jane Mallison, "At the time of his death, Dr. Silverman had completed a draft of a short biography of the poet Emma Lazarus and started work on a book about author Gertrude Stein. . . . Above the desk where he worked was a quote from the painter Robert Rauschenberg, a kind of motto that spoke to the difficulty that Dr. Silverman said he encountered in writing each of his books: 'You're not going anywhere unless there's a wall in front of you'" (Harrison, Washington Post, July 11).

The following reminiscences give a good sense of what Dr. Silverman meant to the Poe community.

From Richard Kopley

I first met Ken Silverman at the Arthur Gordon Pym Conference on Nantucket Island in May 1988. We got to know each other after he published his Poe biography, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance, in 1991. I read it immediately, reviewed it positively in the journal American Literature, and received a thoughtful and appreciative postcard from him. His Poe biography is unquestionably the foremost modern life of Poe—the go-to resource, along with The Poe Log, for any contemporary student of Poe.

Ken and I later met in a restaurant in New York City for tea—he had highlighted mourning as the unifying theme of Poe's life, and he wanted to know what I would have done. I said that I thought the visionary Poe would be my focus, and he seemed interested in that. He gave me an empty tin of Gordon Pym pipe tobacco, which has a place of honor on one of my Poe shelves.

Ken had already written an award-winning biography of Cotton Mather, and he would later do fine biographies of Samuel F. B. Morse, John Cage, and Harry Houdini. He had himself been a magician, and I remember his excitement in telling me about investigating a neglected off-site warehouse of Houdini material held by the Library of Congress. Toward the end of his life, Ken was working on a biography of Emma Lazarus. He explored and illuminated an American pantheon with great research and clear and engaging writing. And he acknowledged the limits of biography. He wrote that "another person's life must remain in essence unknowable and unrevealed." But he spoke for the value of the effort to create a "likeness" of the subject, which reveals "something real and dependable." He concluded, "The challenge is to stay true to the facts but move the reader by the spectacle of another's soul journey through time" ("Mather, Poe, Houdini" in Dale Salwak's The Literary Biography, 116).

I remember well visiting him at his apartment near NYU a year or two ago. His partner, Jane Mallison, welcomed...