The book is illustrated with original photographs of “Poe places” by Michelle Van Parys; it also contains a number of archival images, including contemporary maps of the cities where Poe lived. I would hope that a browsing reader would first just flip through the book and look at some of those photographs, which are an important feature of the project, along with the maps and other archival items. A few of Michelle’s photographs are “blended” with archival images to create a sort of then-and-now effect, which I really like.But in terms of the text, I think the beginning of Chapter Three, which covers Poe’s years in Philadelphia, is a good sample of what the book is like. The first pages are about life in Philadelphia in the years after the Panic of 1837, with some quotations from contemporary observers like Charles Dickens. I also discuss Poe’s motivation for moving there, and where he settled together with Virginia and Maria Clemm. They found a house near Rittenhouse Square, a part of town that was only sparsely developed at the time. And of course, that’s why Poe could afford to live in that area—it hadn’t become fashionable yet.This part of the chapter moves along quickly, as Poe lands a job at Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, and I’m then able to describe some of the people he got to know in connection with that job as well as the significance of magazines in American life in the mid-nineteenth century. About ten pages into the chapter, I discuss some of the satires Poe wrote in the late 1830s: “How to Write a Blackwood Article”, “Peter Pendulum, the Business-Man”, and “The Man That Was Used Up”; some lesser-known stories that I think reflect his skepticism toward the world of business and politics that he was becoming acquainted with in Philadelphia.I wrote in the book’s introduction that this is not a work of academic literary criticism (my background) but that I wanted to write primarily for a non-specialist audience with this project. So when I did discuss specific works by Poe, I could hear the clock ticking, if you know what I mean. I wanted to make these stories more interesting to readers than they would be if you just picked them up without knowing anything about the context. But even when I discussed the title story, “The Man of the Crowd”, I kept it to about three and a half pages. I just tried to be selective in the analysis, keeping the book’s focus and my “ideal” reader in mind.At the same time, I didn’t want to leave significant gaps in the biographical record—I tried to tell a good, true story. If I succeeded, the book works both as an introduction to Edgar Allan Poe and his life for people who are casually acquainted with him and as a book that’s making an argument—that Poe’s career is inseparable from the development of the American city. I hope readers will recalibrate their image of Poe as they read the book and understand him as a writer who was very much engaged with his surroundings, and who struggled to succeed in a rapidly changing world.