Description
Ostrom, John Ward. The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1948)Two volumes, Hardcover, in slipcase. Volume I: 1-306 pp. Volume II: 307-730 pp. Bound in red cloth covered boards in a tan slipcase with paper labels.
Condition: Very Good, not ex-library or ex-libris. Smudges on spine, otherwise a very nice copy
John Ward Ostrom was born in June 1903 [and died in 1993]. When he retired from Wittenberg sixty-eight years later, the event was momentous enough to elicit from The Sun (a local newspaper) both an article and a lead editorial. The editors (one of whom was Witt alum, and later Torch advisor, Alan Barth) called him “one of the foremost teachers in Wittenberg history … one of the University’s foremost scholars and authors. “
A graduate of Gettysburg College, “Jack” Ostrom earned a Ph.D. in English at the University of Virginia, where he wrote a dissertation on the letters of Edgar Allen Poe. His teaching career took him to Gettysburg and The Citadel before he landed at Wittenberg in 1945. Three years later, Harvard University Press published his two- volume The Letters of Edgar Allen Poe, a landmark in Poe studies that established Ostrom as a leading Poe scholar.
Thomas Taylor, Professor of History – Wittenberg University
