The American Boy

Name: The American Boy
Rating: 3.73 (4741 reviews)

by Andrew Taylor

First published 2003

Amazon

3.7(4,741)

England, 1819. Thomas Shield takes a position as a schoolmaster near London and is assigned responsibility for two pupils: Charles Frant and his American companion, the young Edgar Allan Poe. Through the boys he is drawn into the wealthy but unstable Frant household, where debt, inheritance and sexual jealousy have created tensions hidden beneath respectable manners.

A violent death turns Shield’s connection with the family into an investigation and places his attraction to Charles’s mother in direct conflict with his judgement. The novel uses Poe’s documented childhood years in England as a historical point of departure, imagining a Gothic mystery around him without making the future writer its central detective. That restraint keeps the historical Poe as part of the atmosphere and chronology rather than turning his later literary fame into an anachronistic explanation for the crimes.