Edgar Allan Poe: His Life, Letters And Opinions. With Portraits Of Poe And His Mother. Poe, Edgar Allen - Ingram, John Henry.

First edition of the first authentic biography of Poe, a sympathetic portrayal of the author whose reputation had long suffered from the slanders of the editor Rufus Wilmot Griswold. From the early 1870s, the English civil servant John Henry Ingram (1842-1916) zealously amassed a great deal of material for his work, which presented Poe as a "literary gentleman and misunderstood idealist" (Walker, p. 53). An early version of Ingram's biography appeared as part of his four-volume edition of Poe's Works (1874-1875), and this two-volume edition of 1880 was the first complete version. Having dedicated himself so thoroughly to his rehabilitation project, Ingram "bitterly resented the attempts of rival biographers. to intrude into what he thought of as his private domain, or in any way to take credit away from him" (ibid.). The University of Virginia now holds the impressive Poe library collected by Ingram during his research. Ian Walker, Edgar Allan Poe, 2013. Two volumes, octavo. Original green cloth elaborately decorated in gold and black, spines and front boards lettered in black, dark green coated endpapers. Photogravure portrait frontispieces, mounted within decorative borders, in each volume. Small library shelf-labels on front pastedowns, ownership stamp on verso of frontispiece, covered by correction fluid on two other leaves, all to vol. I. Several gatherings uncut. Front inner hinge of vol. I neatly repaired. Spine ends and corners bumped, covers bright, vol. II front endpapers scuffed, minimal foxing to outer leaves. A very good copy.