Susan F. Levine is a Poe scholar of a special sort because her professional life has not revolved around Poe. An expert in Latin American literature, she has published widely on Carlos Fuentes, and at the University of Kansas, she taught Spanish and served in administration before retiring as Assistant Dean of the Graduate School in 1992. Demanding as that academic work was, it never exhausted her intellectual curiosity. Her other activities ranged from creative writing to art collecting, from fossil identification to banjo playing—all of which she still pursues, in her eighties, with characteristic brilliance and verve.
Susan’s abiding interests include, of course, the works of Poe, as her publication record shows. Of particular importance there are the editions of Poe’s writings she prepared with her late husband Stuart, their collaboration beginning in the 1970s and ending with the appearance of Critical Theory: The Major Documents in 2009. Through...
