For several decades now, Edgar Allan Poe has remained one of the most popular American writers. He has received love and recognition around the world for his innovative detective fiction, horror stories and haunting, atmospheric poetry. But what if there was another side to the man who wrote The Raven and The Fall of the House of Usher? In Causes of the Darkness of Night, John Thrash offers a bold new biography of a writer whose short, harrowing life continues to excite and inspire intense interest. Shedding light on an era when the lines between entertainment, speculation, and scientific exploration were blurred, Thresh reveals Poe's obsession with science and his desire to advance and question human knowledge. Poe was an avid and often combative commentator on new discoveries, publishing and appearing on literary stages that also featured the era's most eminent scientists and pseudo-intellectual swindlers. Tresh shows that Poe lived, thought, and suffered surrounded by science, and many of his best-known creative works best viewed through her lens. Pursuing extraordinary insights and a unique aesthetic vision, Poe remained a figure of explosive controversy: he gleefully exposed the hoaxes of the scientific fraudsters of the era, even as he masterfully perpetrated hoaxes in his novels.