Troubled Writer in the Marketplace: Melville's Image of Poe in Pierre

This essay argues that Poe's struggles in the literary marketplace of the 1840s, and especially his efforts to explain the universe in Eureka, inform the figure of the impoverished, disinherited Pierre who attempts to write a "book of truths" in the New York City episodes of Melville's 1852 Pierre; or, The Ambiguities. Future explorations of this admittedly speculative hypothesis, which complicates and enriches rather than undermines long established biographical approaches to the novel's title character, promise fresh perspectives on the imaginative and professional relationship between the two writers.