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Edgar Allen attended to the university of Virginia at the age of 17.

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Poe's horror tales typically revolve around characters who have reached states of extreme alienation, terror, and madness and often contain elements of the supernatural.

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Edgar Allan Poe (; January 19, 1809 - October 7, 1849) was an American writer, poet, author, editor, and literary critic who is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism and Gothic fiction in the United States, and of American literature. Poe was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story, and is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre, as well as a significant contributor to the emerging genre of science fiction. He is the first well-known American writer to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.

Poe was born in Boston, the second child of actors David and Elizabeth "Eliza" Poe. His father abandoned the family in 1810, and when his mother died the following year, Poe was taken in by John and Frances Allan of Richmond, Virginia. They never formally adopted him, but he was with them well into young adulthood. He attended the University of Virginia but left after a year due to lack of money. He quarreled with John Allan over the funds for his education, and his gambling debts. In 1827, having enlisted in the United States Army under an assumed name, he published his first collection, Tamerlane and Other Poems, credited only to "a Bostonian". Poe and Allan reached a temporary rapprochement after the death of Allan's wife in 1829. Poe later failed as an officer cadet at West Point, declared a firm wish to be a poet and writer, and parted ways with Allan.

Poe switched his focus to prose, and spent the next several years working for literary journals and periodicals, becoming known for his own style of literary criticism. His work forced him to move between several cities, including Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. In 1836, he married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm, but she died of tuberculosis in 1847. In January 1845, he published his poem " The Raven" to instant success. He planned for years to produce his own journal The Penn, later renamed . But before it began publishing, Poe died in Baltimore in 1849, aged 40, under mysterious circumstances. The cause of his death remains unknown, and has been variously attributed to many causes including disease, alcoholism, substance abuse, and suicide.

Poe and his works influenced literature around the world, as well as specialized fields such as cosmology and cryptography. He and his work appear throughout popular culture in literature, music, films, and television. A number of his homes are dedicated museums. The Mystery Writers of America present an annual Edgar Award for distinguished work in the mystery genre.

Early life and education

Plaque marking the approximate location of Poe's birth on Carver Street in Boston

Edgar Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 19, 1809, the second child of American actor David Poe Jr. and English-born actress Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe. He had an elder brother, Henry, and a younger sister, Rosalie. Their grandfather, David Poe, had emigrated from County Cavan, Ireland, around 1750.

His father abandoned the family in 1810, and his mother died a year later from pulmonary tuberculosis. Poe was then taken into the home of John Allan, a successful merchant in Richmond, Virginia, who dealt in a variety of goods, including cloth, wheat, tombstones, tobacco, and slaves. The Allans served as a foster family and gave him the name "Edgar Allan Poe", although they never formally adopted him.

The Allan family had Poe baptized into the Episcopal Church in 1812. John Allan alternately spoiled and aggressively disciplined his foster son. The family sailed to the United Kingdom in 1815, and Poe attended the grammar school for a short period in Irvine, Ayrshire, Scotland, where Allan was born, before rejoining the family in London in 1816. There he studied at a boarding school in Chelsea until summer 1817. He was subsequently entered at the Reverend John Bransby's Manor House School at Stoke Newington, then a suburb 4 miles (6 km) north of London.

Poe moved with the Allans back to Richmond in 1820. In 1824, he served as the lieutenant of the Richmond youth honor guard as the city celebrated the visit of the Marquis de Lafayette. In March 1825, Allan's uncle and business benefactor William Galt died, who was said to be one of the wealthiest men in Richmond, leaving Allan several acres of real estate. The inheritance was estimated at $750,000 (equivalent to $19,000,000 in 2022). By summer 1825, Allan celebrated his expansive wealth by purchasing a two-story brick house called Moldavia.

Poe may have become engaged to Sarah Elmira Royster before he registered at the University of Virginia in February 1826 to study ancient and modern languages. The university was in its infancy, established on the ideals of its founder Thomas Jefferson. It had strict rules against gambling, horses, guns, tobacco, and alcohol, but these rules were mostly ignored. Jefferson enacted a system of student self-government, allowing students to choose their own studies, make their own arrangements for boarding, and report all wrongdoing to the faculty. The unique system was still in chaos, and there was a high dropout rate. During his time there, Poe lost touch with Royster and also became estranged from his foster father over gambling debts. He claimed that Allan had not given him sufficient money to register for classes, purchase texts, and procure and furnish a dormitory. Allan did send additional money and clothes, but Poe's debts increased. Poe gave up on the university after a year but did not feel welcome returning to Richmond, especially when he learned that his sweetheart Royster had married another man, Alexander Shelton. He traveled to Boston in April 1827, sustaining himself with odd jobs as a clerk and newspaper writer, and started using the pseudonym Henri Le Rennet during this period.

Military career

In May 1827, Poe enlisted in the U.S. Army, where he was first stationed at Fort Independence in Boston

Poe was unable to support himself, so he enlisted in the United States Army as a private on May 27, 1827, using the name "Edgar A. Perry". He claimed that he was 22 years old even though he was 18. He first served at Fort Independence in Boston Harbor for five dollars a month. That year, he released his first book, a 40-page collection of poetry titled Tamerlane and Other Poems, attributed with the byline "by a Bostonian". Only 50 copies were printed, and the book received virtually no attention. Poe's regiment was posted to Fort Moultrie in Charleston, South Carolina, and traveled by ship on the brig Waltham on November 8, 1827. Poe was promoted to "artificer", an enlisted tradesman who prepared shells for artillery, and had his monthly pay doubled. He served for two years and attained the rank of Sergeant Major for Artillery, the highest rank that a non-commissioned officer could achieve; he then sought to end his five-year enlistment early. He revealed his real name and his circumstances to his commanding officer, Lieutenant Howard, who would allow Poe to be discharged only if he reconciled with Allan. Poe wrote a letter to Allan, who was unsympathetic and spent several months ignoring Poe's pleas; Allan may not have written to Poe even to make him aware of his foster mother's illness. Frances Allan died on February 28, 1829, and Poe visited the day after her burial. Perhaps softened by his wife's death, Allan agreed to support Poe's attempt to be discharged in order to receive an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York.

Poe was finally discharged on April 15, 1829, after securing a replacement to finish his enlisted term for him. Before entering West Point, he moved to Baltimore for a time to stay with his widowed aunt Maria Clemm, her daughter Virginia Eliza Clemm (Poe's first cousin), his brother Henry, and his invalid grandmother Elizabeth Cairnes Poe. In September of that year, Poe received "the very first words of encouragement I ever remember to have heard" in a review of his poetry by influential critic John Neal, prompting Poe to dedicate one of the poems to Neal in his second book Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems, published in Baltimore in 1829.

Poe traveled to West Point and matriculated as a cadet on July 1, 1830. In October 1830, Allan married his second wife Louisa Patterson. The marriage and bitter quarrels with Poe over the children born to Allan out of extramarital affairs led to the foster father finally disowning Poe. Poe decided to leave West Point by purposely getting court-martialed. On February 8, 1831, he was tried for gross neglect of duty and disobedience of orders for refusing to attend formations, classes, or church. He tactically pleaded not guilty to induce dismissal, knowing that he would be found guilty.

Poe left for New York in February 1831 and released a third volume of poems, simply titled Poems. The book was financed with help from his fellow cadets at West Point, many of whom donated 75 cents to the cause, raising a total of $170. They may have been expecting verses similar to the satirical ones Poe had written about commanding officers. It was printed by Elam Bliss of New York, labeled as "Second Edition", and including a page saying, "To the U.S. Corps of Cadets this volume is respectfully dedicated". The book once again reprinted the long poems "Tamerlane" and "Al Aaraaf" but also six previously unpublished poems, including early versions of " To Helen", " Israfel", and " The City in the Sea". Poe returned to Baltimore to his aunt, brother, and cousin in March 1831. His elder brother Henry had been in ill health, in part due to problems with alcoholism, and he died on August 1, 1831.

Publishing career

In 1835, at age 26, Poe obtained a license to marry his cousin Virginia Clemm, who was then age 13; they were married for 11 years until her death, which may have inspired some of Poe's writing.

An 1845 portrait of Poe by Samuel Stillman Osgood

The cottage in the Fordham section of Bronx, where Poe spent his last years

After his brother's death, Poe began more earnest attempts to start his career as a writer, but he chose a difficult time in American publishing to do so. He was one of the first Americans to live by writing alone and was hampered by the lack of an international copyright law. American publishers often produced unauthorized copies of British works rather than paying for new work by Americans. The industry was also particularly hurt by the Panic of 1837. There was a booming growth in American periodicals around this time, fueled in part by new technology, but many did not last beyond a few issues. Publishers often refused to pay their writers or paid them much later than they promised, and Poe repeatedly resorted to humiliating pleas for money and other assistance.

After his early attempts at poetry, Poe had turned his attention to prose, likely based on John Neal's critiques in magazine. He placed a few stories with a Philadelphia publication and began work on his only drama . The Baltimore Saturday Visiter awarded him a prize in October 1833 for his short story " MS. Found in a Bottle". The story brought him to the attention of John P. Kennedy, a Baltimorean of considerable means who helped Poe place some of his stories and introduced him to Thomas W. White, editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond.

In 1835, Poe became assistant editor of the ' Southern Literary Messenger, but White discharged him within a few weeks for being drunk on the job. Poe returned to Baltimore, where he obtained a license to marry his cousin Virginia on September 22, 1835, though it is unknown if they were married at that time. He was 26 and she was 13.

Poe was reinstated by White after promising good behavior, and he returned to Richmond with Virginia and her mother. He remained at the Messenger until January 1837. During this period, Poe claimed that its circulation increased from 700 to 3,500. He published several poems, book reviews, critiques, and stories in the paper. On May 16, 1836, he and Virginia held a Presbyterian wedding ceremony performed by Amasa Converse at their Richmond boarding house, with a witness falsely attesting Clemm's age as 21.

Philadelphia

In 1838, Poe relocated to Philadelphia, where he lived at four different residences between 1838 and 1844, one of which at 532 N. 7th Street has been preserved as a National Historic Landmark.

That same year, Poe's novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket was published and widely reviewed. In the summer of 1839, he became assistant editor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine. He published numerous articles, stories, and reviews, enhancing his reputation as a trenchant critic which he had established at the Messenger. Also in 1839, the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque was published in two volumes, though he made little money from it and it received mixed reviews.

In June 1840, Poe published a prospectus announcing his intentions to start his own journal called , although he originally intended to call it The Penn, since it would have been based in Philadelphia. He bought advertising space for his prospectus in the June 6, 1840, issue of Philadelphia's Saturday Evening Post: "Prospectus of the Penn Magazine, a Monthly Literary journal to be edited and published in the city of Philadelphia by Edgar A. Poe." The journal was never produced before Poe's death.

Poe left Burton's after about a year and found a position as writer and co-editor at Graham's Magazine, a successful monthly publication. In the last number of Graham's for 1841, Poe was among the co-signatories to an editorial note of celebration of the tremendous success the magazine had achieved in the past year: "Perhaps the editors of no magazine, either in America or in Europe, ever sat down, at the close of a year, to contemplate the progress of their work with more satisfaction than we do now. Our success has been unexampled, almost incredible. We may assert without fear of contradiction that no periodical ever witnessed the same increase during so short a period."

Around this time, Poe attempted to secure a position in the administration of John Tyler, claiming that he was a member of the Whig Party. He hoped to be appointed to the United States Custom House in Philadelphia with help from President Tyler's son Robert, an acquaintance of Poe's friend Frederick Thomas. Poe failed to show up for a meeting with Thomas to discuss the appointment in mid-September 1842, claiming to have been sick, though Thomas believed that he had been drunk. Poe was promised an appointment, but all positions were filled by others.

One evening in January 1842, Virginia showed the first signs of consumption, or tuberculosis, while singing and playing the piano, which Poe described as breaking a blood vessel in her throat. She only partially recovered, and Poe began to drink more heavily under the stress of her illness. He left Graham's and attempted to find a new position, for a time angling for a government post. He returned to New York where he worked briefly at the Evening Mirror before becoming editor of the Broadway Journal, and later its owner. There Poe alienated himself from other writers by publicly accusing Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of plagiarism, though Longfellow never responded. On January 29, 1845, Poe's poem " The Raven" appeared in the Evening Mirror and became a popular sensation. It made Poe a household name almost instantly, though he was paid only $9 for its publication. It was concurrently published in The American Review: A Whig Journal under the pseudonym "Quarles".

The Broadway Journal failed in 1846, and Poe moved to a cottage in Fordham, New York, in the Bronx. That home, now known as the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage, was relocated in later years to a park near the southeast corner of the Grand Concourse and Kingsbridge Road. Nearby, Poe befriended the Jesuits at St. John's College, now Fordham University. Virginia died at the cottage on January 30, 1847. Biographers and critics often suggest that Poe's frequent theme of the "death of a beautiful woman" stems from the repeated loss of women throughout his life, including his wife.

Poe was increasingly unstable after his wife's death. He attempted to court poet Sarah Helen Whitman, who lived in Providence, Rhode Island. Their engagement failed, purportedly because of Poe's drinking and erratic behavior. There is also strong evidence that Whitman's mother intervened and did much to derail the relationship. Poe then returned to Richmond and resumed a relationship with his childhood sweetheart Sarah Elmira Royster.

Poe is interred at Westminster Hall in Baltimore, Maryland (Lat: 39.29027; Long: −76.62333); the circumstances and cause of his death remain uncertain.

On October 3, 1849, Poe was found semiconscious in Baltimore, "in great distress, and... in need of immediate assistance", according to Joseph W. Walker, who found him. He was taken to the Washington Medical College, where he died on Sunday, October 7, 1849, at 5:00 in the morning. Poe was not coherent long enough to explain how he came to be in his dire condition and why he was wearing clothes that were not his own. He is said to have repeatedly called out the name "Reynolds" on the night before his death, though it is unclear to whom he was referring. His attending physician said that Poe's final words were, "Lord help my poor soul". All of the relevant medical records have been lost, including Poe's death certificate.

Newspapers at the time reported Poe's death as "congestion of the brain" or "cerebral inflammation", common euphemisms for death from disreputable causes such as alcoholism. The actual cause of death remains a mystery. Speculation has included delirium tremens, heart disease, epilepsy, syphilis, meningeal inflammation, cholera, carbon monoxide poisoning, and rabies. One theory dating from 1872 suggests that Poe's death resulted from cooping, a form of electoral fraud in which citizens were forced to vote for a particular candidate, sometimes leading to violence and even murder.

Griswold's memoir

Immediately after Poe's death, his literary rival Rufus Wilmot Griswold wrote a slanted high-profile obituary under a pseudonym, filled with falsehoods that cast Poe as a lunatic, and which described him as a person who "walked the streets, in madness or melancholy, with lips moving in indistinct curses, or with eyes upturned in passionate prayers, (never for himself, for he felt, or professed to feel, that he was already damned)".

The long obituary appeared in the New York Tribune, signed "Ludwig" on the day that Poe was buried in Baltimore. It was further published throughout the country. The obituary began, "Edgar Allan Poe is dead. He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it." "Ludwig" was soon identified as Griswold, an editor, critic, and anthologist who had borne a grudge against Poe since 1842. Griswold somehow became Poe's literary executor and attempted to destroy his enemy's reputation after his death.

Griswold wrote a biographical article of Poe called "Memoir of the Author", which he included in an 1850 volume of the collected works. There he depicted Poe as a depraved, drunken, drug-addled madman and included Poe's letters as evidence. Many of his claims were either lies or distortions; for example, it is seriously disputed that Poe was a drug addict. Griswold's book was denounced by those who knew Poe well, including John Neal, who published an article defending Poe and attacking Griswold as a " Rhadamanthus, who is not to be bilked of his fee, a thimble-full of newspaper notoriety". Griswold's book nevertheless became a popularly accepted biographical source. This was in part because it was the only full biography available and was widely reprinted, and in part because readers thrilled at the thought of reading works by an "evil" man. Letters that Griswold presented as proof were later revealed as forgeries.

Literary style and themes

Poe's best-known fiction works are Gothic horror, adhering to the genre's conventions to appeal to the public taste. His most recurring themes deal with questions of death, including its physical signs, the effects of decomposition, concerns of premature burial, the reanimation of the dead, and mourning. Many of his works are generally considered part of the dark romanticism genre, a literary reaction to transcendentalism which Poe strongly disliked. He referred to followers of the transcendental movement as "Frog-Pondians", after the pond on Boston Common, and ridiculed their writings as "metaphor-run mad," lapsing into "obscurity for obscurity's sake" or "mysticism for mysticism's sake". Poe once wrote in a letter to Thomas Holley Chivers that he did not dislike transcendentalists, "only the pretenders and sophists among them".

Beyond horror, Poe also wrote satires, humor tales, and hoaxes. For comic effect, he used irony and ludicrous extravagance, often in an attempt to liberate the reader from cultural conformity. " Metzengerstein" is the first story that Poe is known to have published and his first foray into horror, but it was originally intended as a burlesque satirizing the popular genre. Poe also reinvented science fiction, responding in his writing to emerging technologies such as hot air balloons in " The Balloon-Hoax".

Poe wrote much of his work using themes aimed specifically at mass-market tastes. To that end, his fiction often included elements of popular pseudosciences, such as phrenology and physiognomy.

Literary theory

Poe's writing reflects his literary theories, which he presented in his criticism and also in essays such as " The Poetic Principle". He disliked didacticism and allegory, though he believed that meaning in literature should be an undercurrent just beneath the surface. Works with obvious meanings, he wrote, cease to be art. He believed that work of quality should be brief and focus on a specific single effect. To that end, he believed that the writer should carefully calculate every sentiment and idea.

Poe describes his method in writing "The Raven" in the essay " The Philosophy of Composition", and he claims to have strictly followed this method. It has been questioned whether he really followed this system, however. T. S. Eliot said: "It is difficult for us to read that essay without reflecting that if Poe plotted out his poem with such calculation, he might have taken a little more pains over it: the result hardly does credit to the method." Biographer Joseph Wood Krutch described the essay as "a rather highly ingenious exercise in the art of rationalization".

An 1875 illustration of Poe by French impressionist Édouard Manet for the Stéphane Mallarmé translation of "The Raven"

Poe depicted in a modern retouched version of the daguerreotype

During his lifetime, Poe was mostly recognized as a literary critic. Fellow critic James Russell Lowell called him "the most discriminating, philosophical, and fearless critic upon imaginative works who has written in America", suggesting-rhetorically-that he occasionally used prussic acid instead of ink. Poe's caustic reviews earned him the reputation of being a "tomahawk man". A favorite target of Poe's criticism was Boston's acclaimed poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who was often defended by his literary friends in what was later called "The Longfellow War". Poe accused Longfellow of "the heresy of the didactic", writing poetry that was preachy, derivative, and thematically plagiarized. Poe correctly predicted that Longfellow's reputation and style of poetry would decline, concluding, "We grant him high qualities, but deny him the Future".

Poe was also known as a writer of fiction and became one of the first American authors of the 19th century to become more popular in Europe than in the United States. Poe is particularly respected in France, in part due to early translations by Charles Baudelaire. Baudelaire's translations became definitive renditions of Poe's work in Continental Europe.

Poe's early detective fiction tales featuring C. Auguste Dupin laid the groundwork for future detectives in literature. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle said, "Each [of Poe's detective stories] is a root from which a whole literature has developed.... Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?" The Mystery Writers of America have named their awards for excellence in the genre the " Edgars". Poe's work also influenced science fiction, notably Jules Verne, who wrote a sequel to Poe's novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket called An Antarctic Mystery, also known as The Sphinx of the Ice Fields. Science fiction author H. G. Wells noted, " Pym tells what a very intelligent mind could imagine about the south polar region a century ago". In 2013, The Guardian cited Pym as one of the greatest novels ever written in the English language, and noted its influence on later authors such as Doyle, Henry James, B. Traven, and David Morrell.

Horror author and historian H. P. Lovecraft was heavily influenced by Poe's horror tales, dedicating an entire section of his long essay, " Supernatural Horror in Literature", to his influence on the genre. In his letters, Lovecraft described Poe as his "God of Fiction". Lovecraft's earlier stories express a significant influence from Poe. A later work, At the Mountains of Madness, quotes him and was influenced by The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Lovecraft also made extensive use of Poe's unity of effect in his fiction. Alfred Hitchcock once said, "It's because I liked Edgar Allan Poe's stories so much that I began to make suspense films". Many references to Poe's works are present in Vladimir Nabokov's novels.

Like many famous artists, Poe's works have spawned imitators. One trend among imitators of Poe has been claims by clairvoyants or psychics to be "channeling" poems from Poe's spirit. One of the most notable of these was Lizzie Doten, who published Poems from the Inner Life in 1863, in which she claimed to have "received" new compositions by Poe's spirit. The compositions were re-workings of famous Poe poems such as " The Bells", but which reflected a new, positive outlook.

Poe has also received criticism. This is partly because of the negative perception of his personal character and its influence upon his reputation. William Butler Yeats was occasionally critical of Poe and once called him "vulgar". Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson reacted to "The Raven" by saying, "I see nothing in it", and derisively referred to Poe as "the jingle man". Aldous Huxley wrote that Poe's writing "falls into vulgarity" by being "too poetical"-the equivalent of wearing a diamond ring on every finger.

It is believed that only twelve copies have survived of Poe's first book Tamerlane and Other Poems. In December 2009, one copy sold at Christie's auctioneers in New York City for $662,500, a record price paid for a work of American literature.

Physics and cosmology

Eureka: A Prose Poem, an essay written in 1848, included a cosmological theory that presaged the Big Bang theory by 80 years, as well as the first plausible solution to Olbers' paradox. Poe eschewed the scientific method in Eureka and instead wrote from pure intuition. For this reason, he considered it a work of art, not science, but insisted that it was still true and considered it to be his career masterpiece. Even so, Eureka is full of scientific errors. In particular, Poe's suggestions ignored Newtonian principles regarding the density and rotation of planets.

Cryptography

Poe had a keen interest in cryptography. He had placed a notice of his abilities in the Philadelphia paper Alexander's Weekly (Express) Messenger, inviting submissions of ciphers which he proceeded to solve. In July 1841, Poe had published an essay called "A Few Words on Secret Writing" in Graham's Magazine. Capitalizing on public interest in the topic, he wrote " The Gold-Bug" incorporating ciphers as an essential part of the story. Poe's success with cryptography relied not so much on his deep knowledge of that field (his method was limited to the simple substitution cryptogram) as on his knowledge of the magazine and newspaper culture. His keen analytical abilities, which were so evident in his detective stories, allowed him to see that the general public was largely ignorant of the methods by which a simple substitution cryptogram can be solved, and he used this to his advantage. The sensation that Poe created with his cryptography stunts played a major role in popularizing cryptograms in newspapers and magazines.

Two ciphers he published in 1841 under the name "W. B. Tyler" were not solved until 1992 and 2000 respectively. One was a quote from Joseph Addison's play Cato; the other is probably based on a poem by Hester Thrale.

Poe had an influence on cryptography beyond increasing public interest during his lifetime. William Friedman, America's foremost cryptologist, was heavily influenced by Poe. Friedman's initial interest in cryptography came from reading "The Gold-Bug" as a child, an interest that he later put to use in deciphering Japan's PURPLE code during World War II.

In popular culture

As a character

The historical Edgar Allan Poe has appeared as a fictionalized character, often in order to represent the "mad genius" or "tormented artist" and in order to exploit his personal struggles. Many such depictions also blend in with characters from his stories, suggesting that Poe and his characters share identities. Often, fictional depictions of Poe use his mystery-solving skills in such novels as The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl.

Preserved homes, landmarks, and museums

The Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site in Philadelphia, one of several preserved former residences of Poe

No childhood home of Poe is still standing, including the Allan family's Moldavia estate. The oldest standing home in Richmond, the Old Stone House, is in use as the Edgar Allan Poe Museum, though Poe never lived there. The collection includes many items that Poe used during his time with the Allan family, and also features several rare first printings of Poe works. 13 West Range is the dorm room that Poe is believed to have used while studying at the University of Virginia in 1826; it is preserved and available for visits. Its upkeep is overseen by a group of students and staff known as the Raven Society.

The earliest surviving home in which Poe lived is at 203 North Amity St. in Baltimore, which is preserved as the Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum. Poe is believed to have lived in the home at the age of 23 when he first lived with Maria Clemm and Virginia and possibly his grandmother and possibly his brother William Henry Leonard Poe. It is open to the public and is also the home of the Edgar Allan Poe Society.

While in Philadelphia between 1838 and 1844, Poe lived at at least four different residences, including the Indian Queen Hotel at 15 S. 4th Street, at a residence at 16th and Locust Streets, at 2502 Fairmount Street, and then in the Spring Garden section of the city at 532 N. 7th Street, a residence that has been preserved by the National Park Service as the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site. Poe's final home in Bronx, New York City, is preserved as the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage.

In Boston, a commemorative plaque on Boylston Street is several blocks away from the actual location of Poe's birth. The house which was his birthplace at 62 Carver Street no longer exists; also, the street has since been renamed "Charles Street South". A "square" at the intersection of Broadway, Fayette, and Carver Streets had once been named in his honor, but it disappeared when the streets were rearranged. In 2009, the intersection of Charles and Boylston Streets (two blocks north of his birthplace) was designated "Edgar Allan Poe Square".

In March 2014, fundraising was completed for construction of a permanent memorial sculpture, known as Poe Returning to Boston, at this location. The winning design by Stefanie Rocknak depicts a life-sized Poe striding against the wind, accompanied by a flying raven; his suitcase lid has fallen open, leaving a "paper trail" of literary works embedded in the sidewalk behind him. The public unveiling on October 5, 2014, was attended by former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky.

Other Poe landmarks include a building on the Upper West Side, where Poe temporarily lived when he first moved to New York City. A plaque suggests that Poe wrote " The Raven" here. On Sullivan's Island in Charleston County, South Carolina, the setting of Poe's tale " The Gold-Bug" and where Poe served in the Army in 1827 at Fort Moultrie, there is a restaurant called Poe's Tavern. In the Fell's Point section of Baltimore, a bar still stands where legend says that Poe was last seen drinking before his death. Known as "The Horse You Came in On", local lore insists that a ghost whom they call "Edgar" haunts the rooms above.

Photographs

An 1848 "Ultima Thule" daguerreotype of Poe

Early daguerreotypes of Poe continue to arouse great interest among literary historians. Notable among them are:

"Ultima Thule" ("far discovery") to honor the new photographic technique; taken in November 1848 in Providence, Rhode Island, probably by Edwin H. Manchester

"Annie", given to Poe's friend Annie L. Richmond; probably taken in June 1849 in Lowell, Massachusetts, photographer unknown

Poe Toaster

Between 1949 and 2009, a bottle of cognac and three roses were left at Poe's original grave marker every January 19 by an unknown visitor affectionately referred to as the "Poe Toaster". Sam Porpora was a historian at the Westminster Church in Baltimore, where Poe is buried; he claimed on August 15, 2007, that he had started the tradition in 1949. Porpora said that the tradition began in order to raise money and enhance the profile of the church. His story has not been confirmed, and some details which he gave to the press are factually inaccurate. The Poe Toaster's last appearance was on January 19, 2009, the day of Poe's bicentennial.

List of selected works

Short stories

Poetry

Other works

References

^ Sun, Chunyan (April 23, 2015). "Horror from the Soul-Gothic Style in Allan Poe's Horror Fictions" (PDF). English Language Teaching. Canadian Center of Science and Education. 8 (5). doi:10.5539/elt.v8n5p94.

^ Semtner, Christopher P. (2012). Edgar Allan Poe's Richmond: the Raven in the River City. Charleston, SC: History Press. p. 15. ISBN 978-1-60949-607-4. OCLC 779472206.

1634-1699: ^ McCusker, J. J. (1997). How Much Is That in Real Money? A Historical Price Index for Use as a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of the United States: Addenda et Corrigenda (PDF). American Antiquarian Society. 1700-1799: McCusker, J. J. (1992). How Much Is That in Real Money? A Historical Price Index for Use as a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of the United States (PDF). American Antiquarian Society. 1800-present: Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. "Consumer Price Index (estimate) 1800-".

University of Virginia. ^ A Catalogue of the Officers and Students of the University of Virginia. Second Session, Commencing February 1, 1826. Charlottesville, VA: Chronicle Steam Book Printing House, 1880, p. 10

^ Graham, George; Embury, E.; Peterson, Charles; Stephens, A.; Poe, Edgar (December 1841). "The Closing Year". Graham's Magazine. Philadelphia, PA: George R. Graham. We began the year almost unknown; certainly far behind our contemporaries in numbers; we close it with a list of twenty-five thousand subscribers, and the assurance on every hand that our popularity has as yet seen only its dawning. (See page 308 of pdf.)

Schroth, Raymond A. ^ Fordham: A History and Memoir. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008: 22-25.

^ Geiling, Natasha. "The (Still) Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe". Smithsonian Magazine.

^ Van Luling, Todd (January 19, 2017). "A Vengeful Arch-Nemesis Taught You Fake News About Edgar Allan Poe". Huffington Post.

^ "(Introduction)" (Exhibition at Boston Public Library). The Raven in the Frog Pond: Edgar Allan Poe and the City of Boston. The Trustees of Boston College. March 31, 2010.

^ Zimmerman, Brett (2005). Edgar Allan Poe: Rhetoric and Style. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press. pp. 85-87. ISBN 978-0-7735-2899-4.

^ "Longfellow's Serenity and Poe's Prediction" (Exhibition at Boston Public Library and Massachusetts Historical Society). Forgotten Chapters of Boston's Literary History. The Trustees of Boston College. July 30, 2012.

^ McCrum, Robert (November 23, 2013). "The 100 best novels: No 10 - The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe (1838)". The Guardian. Archived from the original on September 11, 2016.

^ Brian Boyd on Speak, Memory Archived 2014-06-29 at the Wayback Machine, Vladimir Nabokov Centennial, Random House, Inc.

"Though some wondered whether Poe wrote the source text, I find that it previously appeared in the ^ Baltimore Sun of July 4, 1840; and that it was in turn based on a widely reprinted poem ("Nuptial Repartee") that first appeared in the June 21, 1813, Morning Herald of London. A manuscript in the hand of Hester Thrale (i.e., Hester Lynch Piozzi) in Harvard's library hints that she may be the true author." From Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living by Paul Collins. Boston: New Harvest/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014: p. 111.

^ "An Interactive Map of Literary Boston: 1794-1862" (Exhibition). Forgotten Chapters of Boston's Literary History. The Trustees of Boston College. July 30, 2012.

^ Lee, M.G. (October 5, 2014). "Edgar Allan Poe immortalized in the city he loathed". The Boston Globe. Archived from the original on July 2, 2015.

^ "Poe Toaster tribute is 'nevermore'". The Baltimore Sun. Tribune Company. January 19, 2010. Archived from the original on January 20, 2012.

Further reading

Bittner, William (1962). . Boston: Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 978-0-316-09686-7.

George Washington Eveleth (1922). Thomas Ollive Mabbott (ed.). The letters from George W. Eveleth to Edgar Allan Poe. Bulletin of the New York Public Library. Vol. 26 (reprint ed.). The New York Public Library.

Pope-Hennessy, Una (1934). Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849: A Critical Biography. New York: Haskell House.

Robinson, Marilynne, "On Edgar Allan Poe", The New York Review of Books, vol. LXII, no. 2 (February 5, 2015), pp. 4, 6.

External links

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Edgar Allan Poe (; January 19, 1809 - October 7, 1849) was an American writer, poet, author, editor, and literary critic who is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism and Gothic fiction in the United States, and of American literature.

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Edgar Allan Poe's death remains one of the great mysteries of American literature.

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Could the pugnacious writer ever have imagined that he would one day become a cult hero? Nick Lehr/The Conversation via DALL-E 2, CC BY-SA

Edgar Allan Poe, who would have turned 214 years old on Jan. 19, 2023, remains one of the world's most recognizable and popular literary figures.

His face - with its sunken eyes, enormous forehead and disheveled black hair - adorns tote bags, coffee mugs, T-shirts and lunch boxes. He appears as a meme, either sporting a popped collar and aviator shades as Edgar Allan Bro, or riffing on "Bohemian Rhapsody" by muttering, "I'm just Poe boy, nobody loves me" as a raven on his shoulder adds, "He's just a Poe boy from a Poe family."

Netflix has sought to capitalize on the writer's popularity, recently releasing the mystery-thriller " The Pale Blue Eye," which features Poe as a West Point cadet, where he spent less than a year before being court-martialed. Netflix also has a Poe-inspired miniseries, " The Fall of the House of Usher," set to be released sometime in 2023.

But as a Poe scholar, I sometimes wonder whether Poe's appeal is less about the power and complexity of his prose and more about an attraction to the idea of Poe.

After all, Poe's most famous literary creations tend to be unsympathetic villains. There are psychopaths who perpetuate seemingly motiveless murders in " The Black Cat" and " The Tell-Tale Heart"; protagonists who abuse women in " Ligeia" and " The Fall of the House of Usher"; and characters who exact cruel, fatal revenge on unwitting victims in " The Cask of Amontillado" and " Hop-Frog."

The degenerate characters whose perspectives Poe invites readers to inhabit don't exactly align with a cultural moment characterized by the #MeToo movement, safe spaces and trigger warnings.

At the same time, the conception of Poe the writer seems to tap into a cultural affection for outsiders, nonconformists and underdogs who ultimately prove their worth.

A character assassination that misfires

The idea of Poe the underdog began with his death in 1849, which was greeted by a cruel notice in the New York Tribune: "This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it."

The obituary writer, who turned out to be Poe's sometime friend and constant rival Rufus W. Griswold, claimed that the deceased had "few or no friends" and proceeded with a general character assassination built on exaggerations and half-truths.

Strange as it seems, Griswold was also Poe's literary executor, and he expanded the obituary into a biographical essay that accompanied Poe's collected works. If this was a marketing ploy, it worked. The friends that Griswold claimed Poe lacked rose to his defense, and journalists spent decades debating who the man really was.

During Poe's lifetime, most readers encountered his work through magazines, and he was rarely well paid. But Griswold's edition went through 19 printings in the 15 years after Poe's death, and his stories and poems have been endlessly reprinted and translated ever since.

Griswold's defamatory portrait, along with the grim subject matter of Poe's stories and poems, still influences the way readers perceive him. But it has also produced a sustained reaction or counterimage of Poe as a tragic hero, a tortured, misunderstood artist who was too good - or, at any rate, too cool - for his world.

While translating Poe's works into French in the 1850s and 1860s, the French poet Charles Baudelaire promoted his hero as a kind of countercultural visionary, out of step with a moralistic, materialistic America. Baudelaire's Poe valued beauty over truth in his poetry and, in his fiction, saw through the self-improvement pieties that were popular at the time to reveal "the natural wickedness of man." Poe struck a chord with European writers, and as his international stature rose in the late 19th century, literary critics in the U.S. wrung their hands over his lack of appreciation "at home."

Poe's underdog story takes off

By the turn of the 20th century, the stage was set for Poe to be embraced as the perennial underdog. And Poe often did appear on stage around this time, as the subject of several biographical melodramas that depicted him as a tragic figure whose lack of success had more to do with a hostile cultural and publishing environment than his own failings.

That image appeared on the silver screen as early as 1909 in D.W. Griffith's short film " Edgar Allen Poe." With Poe's wife, Virginia, languishing on a sick bed, the poet ventures out to sell "The Raven." After meeting rejection and scorn, he manages to sell his manuscript and returns home with provisions for his ailing wife, only to find that she has died.

Later films also depict Poe as being misunderstood or underappreciated in his lifetime. A wildly inaccurate biopic, " The Loves of Edgar Allan Poe," released in 1942, ends with a voice-over commenting, "...little did [the public] know that the manuscript of 'The Raven,' which he tried in vain to sell for $25, would years later bring the price of $17,000 from a collector."

In real life, while an early draft of "The Raven" was declined by one editor, Poe had no trouble selling the poem, and it was an immediate sensation.

But here "The Raven" becomes a stand-in for Poe himself, something dark and mysterious that, according to legend, people in Poe's time failed to appreciate.

Poe is an obscure writer and amateur detective in the 1951 film " The Man with a Cloak," which ends with a saloonkeeper allowing the rain to wash away the ink on an IOU that Poe gave him. On the reverse side of the note is a manuscript of the poem " Annabel Lee," as its bearer declares, "That name'll never be worth anything. Not in a hundred years."

Of course, the audience watching this film almost exactly 100 years after Poe's death knew better.

The most interesting plants grow in the shade

Which brings us to "The Pale Blue Eye," in which Henry Melling portrays Cadet Poe, an outcast with a keen crime solver's intellect. In a refreshing change, this younger Poe is not a tortured artist or a haunted, brooding figure. He is, however, picked on by his peers and underestimated by his superiors - yet again, an underdog viewers want to root for.

In that sense, the Poe in "The Pale Blue Eye" fits well with his contemporary image, which also permeates the early episodes of " Wednesday," Netflix's Addams Family spinoff set at Nevermore Academy that's chock full of Poe references.

The headmistress of Nevermore Academy - a Hogwarts-like school for outcasts - refers to Poe as "our most famous alumni," which explains why the school's annual boat race is the Poe Cup and why there's a statue of Poe guarding a secret passage.

The delightfully antisocial protagonist, Wednesday, played by Jenna Ortega, is an outcast among outcasts - the Poe figure at a school whose name evokes Poe. In one scene, a sympathetic teacher urges her not to lose "the ability to not let others define you. It's a gift." She adds, "The most interesting plants grow in the shade."

When John Lennon sang "Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe" in " I Am the Walrus," he didn't have to say who was kicking him or why. The point was, Poe deserved better; the most interesting plants do grow in the shade, unlovely and unloved.

And that's exactly why so many people - aspiring writers and artists, but also everyone when they're lonely and misunderstood - see a little bit of themselves in the weary-but-wise image of Poe.

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How Edgar Allan Poe became the darling of the maligned and misunderstood

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Is the writer's appeal less about the power and complexity of his prose, and more about the view of him as a perennial underdog?

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Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.

Transcript

Who was Edgar Allan Poe? Born on January 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts, Edgar Allan Poe was a short-story writer, poet, critic, and editor best known for his macabre poems and short stories.
After his mother's death, in 1811, he was taken into the home of John Allan, a wealthy merchant in Richmond, Virginia, and was provided with a classical education that led him to the University of Virginia. After only 11 months, gambling debt caused Poe to be pulled from college. He joined the army and was later admitted to the United States Military Academy at West Point, but he purposefully sought expulsion and began to pursue a full-time writing career.
Poe achieved fame through his short stories and poems, including "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Raven." Many of his pieces focused on dark psychological themes and contained the elements of death, fear, and the supernatural that are associated with his legacy today.
He also wrote the first modern detective story, in 1841: "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." The story launched a new genre and featured a fictional detective named C. Auguste Dupin, a character whose influences can be seen in mystery protagonists including Sherlock Holmes.
In late September 1849 Poe left Richmond and was found semiconscious days later in Baltimore, Maryland. He was admitted to a hospital and died on October 7, 1849. Like the mysterious deaths in his works of fiction, the cause of his own death-whether from drinking, heart failure, or other causes-remains unknown.

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The Mysterious Life of Poet Edgar Allan Poe

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Learn more about the life and career of Edgar Allan Poe.

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Edgar Allan Poe's stories frequently explore themes of death, obsession, isolation, madness, guilt, the macabre, the power of memory, and the psychological complexities of love and loss; often focusing on unreliable narrators who grapple with their own disturbed mental states, creating a sense of paranoia and unsettling atmosphere.

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Gambler

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by Robert Giordano

This site contains short stories and poems by Edgar Allan Poe (Edgar Allen Poe is a common misspelling), story summaries, quotes, and linked vocabulary words and definitions for educational reading. It also includes a short biography, a timeline of Poe's life, and links to other Poe sites.

Most people recognize Poe by his famous poem,"The Raven". Others may have read one of his more popular dark and creepy tales like,"The Fall of the House of Usher" or "The Tell-tale Heart". Poe wrote quite a few gothic stories about murder, revenge, torture, the plague, being buried alive, and insanity. Many modern books and movies have "borrowed" ideas from Poe. Some of Poe's stories were not well accepted in his day because people were just not ready for them- they were too scary.

Many people don't know that Edgar Allan Poe also wrote stories about adventure on the high seas, buried pirate treasure, and a famous balloon ride. Poe invented the detective story with tales like"Murders in the Rue Morgue" and"The Purloined Letter". Sherlock Holmes and other fictional detectives would later be based on the characters that Poe created. Poe wrote love stories and even a few strange little comedies. He attempted to explain the composition of the universe in a way that sounds a little like quantum physics. Explore this site and you'll see why I think Edgar Allan Poe deserves to be recognized as one of the most original, imaginative, and ingenious authors of our society.

Summaries

Poe wrote many stories on many different topics. If you don't know where to start, you can browse short summaries of Edgar Allan Poe stories, so you can find something that interests you. Don't worry, I don't give away the endings!!

Wordlist

This site makes it easy for you read Poe's stories. Poe knew several languages and had quite a large vocabulary. Poe's works are not hard to read but sometimes he uses obscure words or references that the average user may not know. Because of this, I've created an ever growing wordlist containing many of these words and their definitions. When a word in the wordlist appears in any story, it becomes hyperlinked to its definition.

Gallery

In the Gallery, you'll find a large collection of Edgar Allan Poe portraits and daguerreotypes. Learn the details behind each of Poe's commonly recognized portraits.

In the Poe Artwork section, browse a constantly updated selection of art from current artists who were inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, his poetry, and prose. Artists who have created paintings, drawings, or illustrations based on Poe or his works, are invited to contact me about featuring your work on this site.

The Gallery also features photography from various trips to Edgar Allan Poe historic sites, like the ones in Richmond and Baltimore.

About this Site

Poestories.com was originally built by Robert Giordano in 2005 using 100% standards compliant HTML and CSS, written from scratch. In 2019, Robert updated all of the code to an HTML5 "Responsive" layout for phones and mobile devices. This site should work equally well in old browsers from 10 years ago, all the way up to the latest Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge browsers. The site even works in Internet Explorer but why would you do that? Finally it means this site is fully functional with all styles turned off and is accessible to people with disabilities.

Enjoy your visit and don't forget to sign the guestbook.

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Edgar Allan Poe, short stories, tales, and poems

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A collection of stories and poems by Edgar Allan Poe with vocabulary words, a biography, image gallery, and a timeline of Poe's life

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From Out That Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe

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The Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin, is commemorating the 2009 bicentennial of Edgar Allan Poe, American poet, critic and inventor of the detective story, with the exhibition “From Out That Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe.”

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Was in the U.S Army

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Born in Boston on January 19, 1809, Edgar Allan Poe moved to Richmond just three years later with his mother and infant sister. His mother, a talented actress, succumbed to pneumonia soon after their arrival, leaving her children all alone in a strange city. John Allan, a prominent Virginia merchant, agreed, under pressure from his wife, to care for Poe and to pay for his education. While still a young teenager, Poe received special tutoring to gain early entrance into the new University of Virginia, probably on the recommendation of General John H. Cocke, a good friend of Allan's as well as of Thomas Jefferson.

Edgar Allan Poe enrolled at the University on February 14, 1826, the 136th of 177 students registering for the second session. He attended classes in the Schools of Ancient and Modern Languages, under Professors Long and Blaetterman respectively. Although not known for spending long hours at his lessons, Poe was already remarkable for his brooding, lonely genius. His excellent memory allowed him to read ahead in class and recite correctly even when utterly unprepared. In his final examinations, he took top honors in French and Latin and was cited for excellence by both professors.

Only in class from seven until nine-thirty each morning, Poe had ample free time to explore Charlottesville and participate in University activities. He was elected to the Jefferson Literary and Debating Society on June 17, 1826 and once served as its Secretary pro tem. Shortly after joining, he read an essay on "Heat and Cold" and probably took part in the many lively debates of the term. Although he did not regularly present original work to the Society, he often entertained his closest friends with private readings in his room. According to George Douglass Sherley:

His little room on the West Range was often filled with a small, select audience of his most particular friends, who, spell-bound, scarcely breathed while they eagerly listened to some story - strange and wild like all the rest - that he had just written and which he read with his whole soul thrown into every action and intonation of his voice - now loud and rapid like the mad rush of many waters, and now sinking into a scarcely audible whisper, of some terrible sentence of incantation or curse sending a shiver over all that heard.

Generally well-liked, Poe was considered talented, if slightly odd by his peers. Once when he read a short story written specially for his friends, someone laughingly claimed that the hero's name, "Gaffy," was repeated too often. Before the others could object, Poe hurled his manuscript into the fire, thereby earning the longtime nickname "Gaffy" Poe. This nickname, though never relished, is said to have followed him all the way to West Point five years later.

In the University of Virginia Library's WWW Exhibit "Arise and Build" a letter is displayed, written by Poe and addressed to John Allan, dated September 21, 1826. His letter bemoans the approach of finals and the many hours spent studying. Poe also writes about the continuing construction of the University, noting that the Rotunda was almost completed. He closes his letter with an account of a particularly nasty altercation between two students. Such was the life of a student in the nineteenth century.

Although a gifted and popular student, Poe left the University on December 15, 1826, never to return. The funds his stepfather had sent him were woefully inadequate despite his many pleas for more assistance. He was forced to borrow on credit from Charlottesville merchants and then turned to heavy gambling in an attempt to pay his bills. Unfortunately, Poe was extremely unlucky at cards, and by the end of the ten-month session, had amassed a debt of over $2,000. John Allan, who disapproved strongly of gambling, was furious with his stepson and refused to allow him to return to the University. On his last night in Room 13, West Range, Poe spoke earnestly with William Wertenbaker, the University librarian, of his deep regret and declared that he was honor-bound to pay every last cent at his earliest opportunity.

A pane of glass taken from the window of Room 13, West Range, is on display in the University's Rotunda. According to legend, Poe etched the following stanza into this pane sometime before his unfortunate departure:

O Thou timid one, let not thy

Form rest in slumber within these

Unhallowed walls,

For herein lies

The ghost of an awful crime.

After returning to Richmond, Poe was trained as a clerk and put to work in his stepfather's counting house. Frustrated by Allan's stifling authoritarianism and sarcastic contempt for his writing, Poe secretly sought independence and applied for other employment. Upon discovery, he was heartily denounced as an ungrateful wretch and ordered from the family home. He soon moved to Boston, in 1827, where his first book Tamerlane and Other Poems, was published the very same year. It was not until the 1845 publication of "The Raven" however, that Poe achieved any real national prominence. Although famous almost overnight, he remained deperately poor, for without copyright protection, the countless reprints brought him nothing. He died just four years later, on October 7, 1849, and despite his short life, is today recognized as one of America's most brilliant poets.

His enduring influence is evident in the number of visitors drawn each year to the University of Virginia just to get a glimpse of Poe's Roomand hear the stories of his early days. Although his stay at the University was regrettably brief, it is natural to wonder how his time here helped shape his later life and works. He wrote "Tamerlane" while still a student, and in both this poem and "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains", he refers explicitly to his experiences in Charlottesville. President Alderman, in an address during the Poe Centenary celebrations, surmised that the youthful promise of the place could not have failed to help inspire him. Many scholars have long suggested that two lines of his classic poem, "To Helen", may reflect his feelings about the University of Virginia's historic Lawn. Published in the Poems of 1831, "To Helen" was probably written soon after he left the University and may contain an allusion to the Greek and Roman architecture of the Lawn.

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Born in Boston on January 19, 1809, Edgar Allan Poe moved to Richmond just three years later with his mother and infant sister. His mother, a talented actress, succumbed to pneumonia soon after their arrival, leaving her children all alone in a strange city.

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Life

Poe was the son of the English-born actress Elizabeth Arnold Poe and David Poe, Jr., an actor from Baltimore. After his mother died in Richmond, Virginia, in 1811, he was taken into the home of John Allan, a Richmond merchant (presumably his godfather), and of his childless wife. He was later taken to Scotland and England (1815-20), where he was given a classical education that was continued in Richmond. For 11 months in 1826 he attended the University of Virginia, but his gambling losses at the university so incensed his guardian that he refused to let him continue, and Poe returned to Richmond to find his sweetheart, (Sarah) Elmira Royster, engaged. He went to Boston, where in 1827 he published a pamphlet of youthful Byronic poems, Tamerlane, and Other Poems. Poverty forced him to join the army under the name of Edgar A. Perry, but, on the death of Poe's foster mother, John Allan purchased his release from the army and helped him get an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Before going, Poe published a new volume at Baltimore, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829). He successfully sought expulsion from the academy, where he was absent from all drills and classes for a week. He proceeded to New York City and brought out a volume of Poems, containing several masterpieces, some showing the influence of John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He then returned to Baltimore, where he began to write stories. In 1833 his " MS. Found in a Bottle" won $50 from a Baltimore weekly, and by 1835 he was in Richmond as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger. There he made a name as a critical reviewer and married his young cousin Virginia Clemm, who was only 13. Poe seems to have been an affectionate husband and son-in-law.

Poe was dismissed from his job in Richmond, apparently for drinking, and went to New York City. Drinking was in fact to be the bane of his life. To talk well in a large company he needed a slight stimulant, but a glass of sherry might start him on a spree; and, although he rarely succumbed to intoxication, he was often seen in public when he did. This gave rise to the conjecture that Poe was a drug addict, but according to medical testimony he had a brain lesion. While in New York City in 1838 he published a long prose narrative, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, combining (as so often in his tales) much factual material with the wildest fancies. It is considered one inspiration of Herman Melville's Moby Dick. In 1839 he became coeditor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in Philadelphia. There a contract for a monthly feature stimulated him to write "William Wilson" and "The Fall of the House of Usher," stories of supernatural horror. The latter contains a study of a neurotic now known to have been an acquaintance of Poe, not Poe himself.

Later in 1839 Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque appeared (dated 1840). He resigned from Burton's about June 1840 but returned in 1841 to edit its successor, Graham's Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine, in which he printed "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"-the first detective story. In 1843 his "The Gold Bug" won a prize of $100 from the Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper, which gave him great publicity. In 1844 he returned to New York, wrote "The Balloon Hoax" for the Sun, and became subeditor of the New York Mirror under N.P. Willis, thereafter a lifelong friend. In the New York Mirror of January 29, 1845, appeared, from advance sheets of the American Review, his most famous poem, "The Raven," which gave him national fame at once. Poe then became editor of the Broadway Journal, a short-lived weekly, in which he republished most of his short stories, in 1845. During this last year the now-forgotten poet Frances Sargent Locke Osgood pursued Poe. Virginia did not object, but "Fanny's" indiscreet writings about her literary love caused great scandal. His The Raven and Other Poems and a selection of his Tales came out in 1845, and in 1846 Poe moved to a cottage at Fordham (now part of New York City), where he wrote for Godey's Lady's Book (May-October 1846) "The Literati of New York City"-gossipy sketches on personalities of the day, which led to a libel suit.

Poe's wife, Virginia, died in January 1847. The following year he went to Providence, Rhode Island, to woo Sarah Helen Whitman, a poet. There was a brief engagement. Poe had close but platonic entanglements with Annie Richmond and with Sarah Anna Lewis, who helped him financially. He composed poetic tributes to all of them. In 1848 he also published the lecture "Eureka," a transcendental "explanation" of the universe, which has been hailed as a masterpiece by some critics and as nonsense by others. In 1849 he went south, had a wild spree in Philadelphia, but got safely to Richmond, where he finally became engaged to Elmira Royster, by then the widowed Mrs. Shelton, and spent a happy summer with only one or two relapses. He enjoyed the companionship of childhood friends and an unromantic friendship with a young poet, Susan Archer Talley.

Poe had some forebodings of death when he left Richmond for Baltimore late in September. There he died, although whether from drinking, heart failure, or other causes was still uncertain in the 21st century. He was buried in Westminster Presbyterian churchyard in Baltimore.

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Edgar Allan Poe | Biography, Poems, Short Stories, & Facts

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Edgar Allan Poe, the master of macabre literature and pioneer of detective fiction, intrigued readers with his haunting tales that explored the depths of human psychology.

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Edgar Allan Poe And His Literary Legacy I Oxford Open Learning

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Edgar Allan Poe transformed the horror genre. He mastered the art of suspense and crafted melancholic, eerie atmospheres unlike any other.

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Exploring the Dark and Macabre: Edgar Allan Poe and His Literary Legacy

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Edgar Allan Poe, one of the most renowned American writers, is synonymous with the macabre and the mysterious. His works, filled with haunting tales, psychological depth, and a touch of horror, have…

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The Writings of Edgar Allan Poe:

The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe  (A comprehensive collection of e-texts of all of Poe’s prose and poetical writings, from the original sources and with multiple versions as revised during his lifetime — includes poems, tales, sketches, essays, literary criticism, letters and miscellanea. Along with individual items, several important and scholarly collections are also provided, including the Harrison and Mabbott/Pollin editions.)

Information about Edgar Allan Poe:

Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography  (by Arthur Hobson Quinn — still the standard biography, perhaps slightly dated but sympathetic, and an impressive accumulation of what we know about Poe, done with great care and skill by someone with superb academic credentials, training and experience). (For a more condensed biography, see the “Annals” by Thomas Ollive Mabbott.)

The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe  (by Dwight R. Thomas and David K. Jackson — a chronologically sequenced collection of statements and extracts that provides an invaluable overview of Poe’s life, rooted in historical documents)

The Portraits and Daguerreotypes of Edgar Allan Poe  (by Michael J. Deas — the definitive book on Poe’s appearance and iconography, with many images now provided in full color)

Poe Studies / Dark Romanticism  (Full issues, 1968-1987)

A Poe Bookshelf  (A large selection of books, articles and lectures about Poe, all presented as e-text, with a few general lists of errata for more current books still under copy-right.)

General Topics about Edgar Allan Poe  (Standard Reference Works, Poe’s Death, etc.)

Searching  this site (via Google)

Information about Edgar Allan Poe in Baltimore:

Poe in Baltimore  (with a chronology)

The Baltimore Poe House and Museum

The Poe Grave and Memorial  (Westminster Burying Ground)

The Site of Poe’s Death  (formerly the Washington University Hospital, the Baltimore City Marine Hospital, and the Church Home and Hospital)

The Moses Ezekiel Statue of Poe  (University of Baltimore, Law School Plaza)

Information About the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore:

A Brief History of the Poe Society

Poe Society Contact Information

Poe Society Membership Information

Poe Society Archives  (University of Baltimore, Langsdale Library, Special Collections)

Other Links:

Poe-related Organizations and Links

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“Depend upon it, after all, Thomas, Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path.” — from a letter by Edgar Allan Poe to Frederick W. Thomas (February 14, 1849).

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Notes:

Author.............: The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore

Created...........: May 1, 1997

Last update.....: January 1, 2022

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[S:1 - JAS] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore Allan Poe

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Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - The Life and Writings of Edgar Allan Poe

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The website for people interested in serious scholarship and study about Edgar Allan Poe: biographies, chronologies, and a comprehensive collection of the works of Edgar Allan Poe, including poems, short stories, Pym, letters, criticism and miscellaneous writings, with variants and bibliographies, a…

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Written by Susie Zappia

Edgar Allan Poe's 19th century poems and short stories still exert a wide influence on American pop culture and film, education and literature. Ironically, while he achieved some degree of fame and fortune upon the publication of his poem "The Raven" in 1845, Poe struggled desperately with his literary career during his own lifetime. For almost 50 years after his death, Poe's work was largely disregarded in both the United States and Great Britain. It was only after the French poet Charles Baudelaire began to recognize the genius in Poe's work that American appreciation for his work soared.

Poe's Reputation

Poe came into his own by the end of the 19th century. He'd inspired and influenced not only Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but also Fyodor Dostoevsky, George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and the poet W.H. Auden. By the mid 20th century, Poe joined Twain, Melville, Hawthorne and Hemingway on American high school reading lists. "Atlantic" writer Scott Meslow calls Poe "one of the few writers to have fully pervaded America's pop-culture consciousness" and points out that Poe's legacy is evident in comic books, albums, films, television dramas and even computer games.

Poe and Writing

Poe is credited with the invention of both the detective story and the horror genre. His detective character Dupin represents a unique literary innovation, and one which Conan Doyle always acknowledged for influence. Stephen King cites Poe as an author he loved during his teen years. Karen Harper, who has taught both high school and college English, believes that reading Poe's short stories in print often helps her students to understand the setting or mood for a story. Along with Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley, Poe is a pioneer of horror fiction. In addition, his prose poem "Eureka" is sometimes considered an early work of science fiction.

Poe in Film and Music

Poe has himself appeared in a Batman comic, as a wild biker with a companion raven on the handlebars in a 1970 Roger Corman film, and once in a Stroh's beer commercial several decades ago. The raven motif has been used in an episode of "The Simpsons." Poe was named in Beatles' lyrics in the song "I Am the Walrus," on the 1967 "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album. The group also gave him the honor of using his image on the iconic album cover. Lou Reed's concept album, titled "The Raven," featured interpretations of Poe's works by actors, including Steve Buscemi and Willem Dafoe.

Creative Challenges

The good news for those in the creative arts is that Poe's work has been in the public domain for a very long time. One creative challenge is the brevity of many of his best works, including "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Tell-Tale Heart." They don't lend themselves easily to feature-length films, but the 1932 movie "Murders in the Rue Morgue" and Roger Corman's 1961 "The Pit and the Pendulum" are considered among the best adaptations. A 1953 animated short "The Tell-Tale Heart" was nominated for an Oscar but also censored with an X-rating by the British Board of Film Censors. Yet, ironically, Poe earned about $6,200 from his writing in his lifetime, according to Richard Kopley, author of "Edgar Allan Poe and the Dupin Mysteries."

About the Author

Susie Zappia teaches humanities and research and writing courses online for several colleges. Her research interests include counterculture literature of the 1960 and instructional design for online courses and she enjoys writing about literature, art and instructional design. She holds a Master of Arts in humanities from California State University, Dominguez Hills and a Master of Science in instructional design from Capella University.

Photo Credits

Photos.com/Photos.com/Getty Images

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Influence of Edgar Allan Poe on American Culture

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Edgar Allan Poe's 19th century poems and short stories still exert a wide influence on American pop culture and film, education and literature. Ironically, while he achieved some degree of fame and fortune upon the publication of his poem "The Raven" in 1845, Poe struggled desperately with his literary ...

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On January 19, 1809, poet, author and literary critic Edgar Allan Poe is born in Boston, Massachusetts.

By the time he was three years old, both of Poe's parents had died, leaving him in the care of his godfather, John Allan, a wealthy tobacco merchant. After attending school in England, Poe entered the University of Virginia (UVA) in 1826. After fighting with Allan over his heavy gambling debts, he was forced to leave UVA after only eight months. Poe then served two years in the U.S. Army and won an appointment to West Point. After another falling-out, Allan cut him off completely and he got himself dismissed from the academy for rules infractions.

WATCH: The Mystery of Edgar Allan Poe on HISTORY Vault

Dark, handsome and brooding, Poe had published three works of poetry by that time, none of which had received much attention. In 1836, while working as an editor at the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, Virginia, Poe married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm. He also completed his first full-length work of fiction, Arthur Gordon Pym, published in 1838. Poe lost his job at the Messenger due to his heavy drinking, and the couple moved to Philadelphia, where Poe worked as an editor at Burton's Gentleman's Magazine and Graham's Magazine. He became known for his direct and incisive criticism, as well as for dark horror stories like "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Tell-Tale Heart." Also around this time, Poe began writing mystery stories, including "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter"-works that would earn him a reputation as the father of the modern detective story.

In 1844, the Poes moved to New York City. He scored a spectacular success the following year with his poem "The Raven." While Poe was working to launch The Broadway Journal-which soon failed-his wife Virginia fell ill and died of tuberculosis in early 1847. His wife's death drove Poe even deeper into alcoholism and drug abuse. After becoming involved with several women, Poe returned to Richmond in 1849 and got engaged to an old flame. Before the wedding, however, Poe died suddenly. Though circumstances are somewhat unclear, it appeared he began drinking at a party in Baltimore and disappeared, only to be found incoherent in a gutter three days later. Taken to the hospital, he died on October 7, 1849, at age 40.
READ MORE: The Riddle of Edgar Allan Poe's Death

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The famed writer of macabre literary fiction is born in Boston, MA.

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Edgar Allan Poe's stature as a major figure in world literature is primarily based on his ingenious and profound short stories, poems, and critical theories, which established a highly influential rationale for the short form in both poetry and fiction. Regarded in literary histories and handbooks as the architect of the modern short story, Poe was also the principal forerunner of the "art for art's sake" movement in 19th-century European literature. Whereas earlier critics predominantly concerned themselves with moral or ideological generalities, Poe focused his criticism on the specifics of style and construction that contributed to a work's effectiveness or failure. In his own work, he demonstrated a brilliant command of language and technique as well as an inspired and original imagination. Poe's poetry and short stories greatly influenced the French Symbolists of the late 19th century, who in turn altered the direction of modern literature.

Poe's father and mother were professional actors. At the time of his birth in 1809, they were members of a repertory company in Boston. Before Poe was three years old both of his parents died, and he was raised in the home of John Allan, a prosperous exporter from Richmond, Virginia, who never legally adopted his foster son. As a boy, Poe attended the best schools available, and was admitted to the University of Virginia at Charlottesville in 1825. While there he distinguished himself academically but was forced to leave after less than a year because of bad debts and inadequate financial support from Allan. Poe's relationship with Allan disintegrated upon his return to Richmond in 1827, and soon after Poe left for Boston, where he enlisted in the army and also published his first poetry collection, Tamerlane, and Other Poems. The volume went unnoticed by readers and reviewers, and a second collection, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, received only slightly more attention when it appeared in 1829. That same year Poe was honorably discharged from the army, having attained the rank of regimental sergeant major, and was then admitted to the United States Military Academy at West Point. However, because Allan would neither provide his foster son with sufficient funds to maintain himself as a cadet nor give the consent necessary to resign from the Academy, Poe gained a dismissal by ignoring his duties and violating regulations. He subsequently went to New York City, where Poems, his third collection of verse, was published in 1831, and then to Baltimore, where he lived at the home of his aunt, Mrs. Maria Clemm.

Over the next few years Poe's first short stories appeared in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier and his "MS. Found in a Bottle" won a cash prize for best story in the Baltimore Saturday Visitor. Nevertheless, Poe was still not earning enough to live independently, nor did Allan's death in 1834 provide him with an inheritance. The following year, however, his financial problems were temporarily alleviated when he accepted an editorship at The Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, bringing with him his aunt and his 12-year-old cousin Virginia, whom he married in 1836. The Southern Literary Messenger was the first of several journals Poe would direct over the next 10 years and through which he rose to prominence as a leading man of letters in America. Poe made himself known not only as a superlative author of poetry and fiction, but also as a literary critic whose level of imagination and insight had hitherto been unapproached in American literature. While Poe's writings gained attention in the late 1830s and early 1840s, the profits from his work remained meager, and he supported himself by editing Burton's Gentleman's Magazine and Graham's Magazine in Philadelphia and the Broadway Journal in New York City. After his wife's death from tuberculosis in 1847, Poe became involved in a number of romantic affairs. It was while he prepared for his second marriage that Poe, for reasons unknown, arrived in Baltimore in late September of 1849. On October 3, he was discovered in a state of semi-consciousness; he died four days later without regaining the necessary lucidity to explain what had happened during the last days of his life.

Poe's most conspicuous contribution to world literature derives from the analytical method he practiced both as a creative author and as a critic of the works of his contemporaries. His self-declared intention was to formulate strictly artistic ideals in a milieu that he thought overly concerned with the utilitarian value of literature, a tendency he termed the "heresy of the Didactic." While Poe's position includes the chief requisites of pure aestheticism, his emphasis on literary formalism was directly linked to his philosophical ideals: through the calculated use of language one may express, though always imperfectly, a vision of truth and the essential condition of human existence. Poe's theory of literary creation is noted for two central points: first, a work must create a unity of effect on the reader to be considered successful; second, the production of this single effect should not be left to the hazards of accident or inspiration, but should to the minutest detail of style and subject be the result of rational deliberation on the part of the author. In poetry, this single effect must arouse the reader's sense of beauty, an ideal that Poe closely associated with sadness, strangeness, and loss; in prose, the effect should be one revelatory of some truth, as in "tales of ratiocination" or works evoking "terror, or passion, or horror."

Aside from a common theoretical basis, there is a psychological intensity that is characteristic of Poe's writings, especially the tales of horror that comprise his best and best-known works. These stories-which include "The Black Cat," "The Cask of Amontillado," and "The Tell-Tale Heart"-are often told by a first-person narrator, and through this voice Poe probes the workings of a character's psyche. This technique foreshadows the psychological explorations of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the school of psychological realism. In his Gothic tales, Poe also employed an essentially symbolic, almost allegorical method which gives such works as "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Masque of the Red Death," and "Ligeia" an enigmatic quality that accounts for their enduring interest and links them with the symbolical works of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. The influence of Poe's tales may be seen in the work of later writers, including Ambrose Bierce and H.P. Lovecraft, who belong to a distinct tradition of horror literature initiated by Poe. In addition to his achievement as creator of the modern horror tale, Poe is also credited with parenting two other popular genres: science fiction and the detective story. In such works as "The Unparalleled Adventure of Hans Pfaall" and "Von Kempelen and His Discovery," Poe took advantage of the fascination for science and technology that emerged in the early 19th century to produce speculative and fantastic narratives which anticipate a type of literature that did not become widely practiced until the 20th century. Similarly, Poe's three tales of ratiocination-"The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Purloined Letter," and "The Mystery of Marie Roget"-are recognized as the models which established the major characters and literary conventions of detective fiction, specifically the amateur sleuth who solves a crime that has confounded the authorities and whose feats of deductive reasoning are documented by an admiring associate. Just as Poe influenced many succeeding authors and is regarded as an ancestor of such major literary movements as Symbolism and Surrealism, he was also influenced by earlier literary figures and movements. In his use of the demonic and the grotesque, Poe evidenced the impact of the stories of E.T.A. Hoffman and the Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe, while the despair and melancholy in much of his writing reflects an affinity with the Romantic movement of the early 19th century. It was Poe's particular genius that in his work he gave consummate artistic form both to his personal obsessions and those of previous literary generations, at the same time creating new forms which provided a means of expression for future artists.

While Poe is most often remembered for his short fiction, his first love as a writer was poetry, which he began writing during his adolescence. His early verse reflects the influence of such English romantics as Lord Byron, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, yet foreshadows his later poetry which demonstrates a subjective outlook and surreal, mystic vision. "Tamerlane" and "Al Aaraaf" exemplify Poe's evolution from the portrayal of Byronic heroes to the depiction of journeys within his own imagination and subconscious. The former piece, reminiscent of Byron's "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," recounts the life and adventures of a 14th-century Mongol conqueror; the latter poem portrays a dreamworld where neither good nor evil permanently reside and where absolute beauty can be directly discerned. In other poems-" To Helen," "Lenore," and " The Raven" in particular-Poe investigates the loss of ideal beauty and the difficulty in regaining it. These pieces are usually narrated by a young man who laments the untimely death of his beloved. "To Helen" is a three stanza lyric that has been called one of the most beautiful love poems in the English language. The subject of the work is a woman who becomes, in the eyes of the narrator, a personification of the classical beauty of ancient Greece and Rome. "Lenore" presents ways in which the dead are best remembered, either by mourning or celebrating life beyond earthly boundaries. In "The Raven," Poe successfully unites his philosophical and aesthetic ideals. In this psychological piece, a young scholar is emotionally tormented by a raven's ominous repetition of "Nevermore" in answer to his question about the probability of an afterlife with his deceased lover. Charles Baudelaire noted in his introduction to the French edition of "The Raven": "It is indeed the poem of the sleeplessness of despair; it lacks nothing: neither the fever of ideas, nor the violence of colors, nor sickly reasoning, nor drivelling terror, nor even the bizarre gaiety of suffering which makes it more terrible." Poe also wrote poems that were intended to be read aloud. Experimenting with combinations of sound and rhythm, he employed such technical devices as repetition, parallelism, internal rhyme, alliteration, and assonance to produce works that are unique in American poetry for their haunting, musical quality. In "The Bells," for example, the repetition of the word "bells" in various structures accentuates the unique tonality of the different types of bells described in the poem.

While his works were not conspicuously acclaimed during his lifetime, Poe did earn due respect as a gifted fiction writer, poet, and man of letters, and occasionally he achieved a measure of popular success, especially following the appearance of " The Raven." After his death, however, the history of his critical reception becomes one of dramatically uneven judgments and interpretations. This state of affairs was initiated by Poe's one-time friend and literary executor R.W. Griswold, who, in a libelous obituary notice in the New York Tribune bearing the byline "Ludwig," attributed the depravity and psychological aberrations of many of the characters in Poe's fiction to Poe himself. In retrospect, Griswold's vilifications seem ultimately to have elicited as much sympathy as censure with respect to Poe and his work, leading subsequent biographers of the late 19th century to defend, sometimes too devotedly, Poe's name. It was not until the 1941 biography by A.H. Quinn that a balanced view was provided of Poe, his work, and the relationship between the author's life and his imagination. Nevertheless, the identification of Poe with the murderers and madmen of his works survived and flourished in the 20th century, most prominently in the form of psychoanalytical studies such as those of Marie Bonaparte and Joseph Wood Krutch. Added to the controversy over the sanity, or at best the maturity of Poe (Paul Elmer More called him "the poet of unripe boys and unsound men"), was the question of the value of Poe's works as serious literature. At the forefront of Poe's detractors were such eminent figures as Henry James, Aldous Huxley, and T.S. Eliot, who dismissed Poe's works as juvenile, vulgar, and artistically debased; in contrast, these same works have been judged to be of the highest literary merit by such writers as Bernard Shaw and William Carlos Williams. Complementing Poe's erratic reputation among English and American critics is the more stable, and generally more elevated opinion of critics elsewhere in the world, particularly in France. Following the extensive translations and commentaries of Charles Baudelaire in the 1850s, Poe's works were received with a peculiar esteem by French writers, most profoundly those associated with the late 19th-century movement of Symbolism, who admired Poe's transcendent aspirations as a poet; the 20th-century movement of Surrealism, which valued Poe's bizarre and apparently unruled imagination; and such figures as Paul Valéry, who found in Poe's theories and thought an ideal of supreme rationalism. In other countries, Poe's works have enjoyed a similar regard, and numerous studies have been written tracing the influence of the American author on the international literary scene, especially in Russia, Japan, Scandinavia, and Latin America.

Today, Poe is recognized as one of the foremost progenitors of modern literature, both in its popular forms, such as horror and detective fiction, and in its more complex and self-conscious forms, which represent the essential artistic manner of the 20th century. In contrast to earlier critics who viewed the man and his works as one, criticism of the past 25 years has developed a view of Poe as a detached artist who was more concerned with displaying his virtuosity than with expressing his soul, and who maintained an ironic rather than an autobiographical relationship to his writings. While at one time critics such as Yvor Winters wished to remove Poe from literary history, his works remain integral to any conception of modernism in world literature. Herbert Marshall McLuhan wrote in an essay entitled "Edgar Poe's Tradition": "While the New England dons primly turned the pages of Plato and Buddha beside a tea-cozy, and while Browning and Tennyson were creating a parochial fog for the English mind to relax in, Poe never lost contact with the terrible pathos of his time. Coevally with Baudelaire, and long before Conrad and Eliot, he explored the heart of darkness."

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Edgar Allan Poe's stature as a major figure in world literature is primarily based on his ingenious and profound short stories, poems, and critical theories, which established a highly influential rationale for the short form in both poetry and fiction. Regarded in literary histories and handbooks...

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The National Endowment for the Humanities

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And, overall, Poe wielded the kind of literary power that "can only be possessed by a man of high genius," according to the anonymous reviewer-who was almost certainly Edgar Allan Poe himself.

Poe's reputation as a major American writer is unassailable. He invented the modern detective story, successfully transported the gothic tale across the Atlantic, and wrote classic dark poems like "The Raven," "Annabel Lee," and "The Bells." But, during Poe's lifetime, such high points were intermittent, hard-fought, and rarely financial successes. More often, Poe made his living by toiling at now-forgotten magazines like the Southern Literary Messenger, Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, and Graham's Magazine.

This struggle to make art amid his struggles-he was an orphan, an alcoholic, an academic bust at the University of Virginia and West Point, and often on the run from creditors-is the crux of the American Masters documentary Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive, which airs on PBS October 30. Through dramatic readings of Poe's work and a moody performance of Poe himself by Denis O'Hare, the film captures an author scrabbling for a place in the literary world. His gloom, the film suggests, became a kind of asset for Poe, providing a tone for his stories and poetry as well as a means of attack against the "puffing" of American authors that defined much literary criticism at the time.

Poe churned out reams of puff-free reviews-the Library of America's collection of his reviews and essays fills nearly 1,500 dense pages. Few outside of Poe scholarship circles bother reading them now, though; in a discipline that's had its share of so-called takedown artists, Poe was an especially unlovable literary critic. He occasionally celebrated authors he admired, such as Charles Dickens and Nathaniel Hawthorne. But, from 1835 until his death in 1849, the typical Poe book review sloshed with invective.

Tackling a collection of poems by William W. Lord in 1845, Poe opined that "the only remarkable things about Mr. Lord's compositions are their remarkable conceit, ignorance, impudence, platitude, stupidity, and bombast." He opened his review of Susan Rigby Morgan's 1836 novel, The Swiss Heiress, by proclaiming that it "should be read by all who have nothing better to do." The prose of Theodore S. Fay's 1835 novel, Norman Leslie, was "unworthy of a school-boy." A year later, Poe doomed Morris Mattson's novel Paul Ulric by pushing Fay under the bus yet again, writing, "When we called Norman Leslie the silliest book in the world we had certainly never seen Paul Ulric."

Such candor did Poe's career no favors. Fay was the editor of the New York Mirror, where Poe would later go begging for a job in 1844, landing only a low-level copyediting gig. Three years earlier Poe had declared H. T. Tuckerman, editor of the Boston Miscellany, an "insufferably tedious and dull writer," a statement that haunted Poe a year later when he submitted "The Tell-Tale Heart" to Tuckerman for publication. "If Mr. Poe would condescend to furnish more quiet articles," Tuckerman wrote in his icy rejection letter, "he would be a most desirable correspondent." Upon Poe's death, critic Rufus Griswold wrote an obituary for the New York Tribune of surprising meanness. Griswold claimed that Poe "had few or no friends" and that "few will be grieved" by his passing-perhaps an act of revenge for Poe's own cruelties toward Griswold as a rival critic. Poe once dismissed him as a "toady" destined to "sink into oblivion."

For some writers, such salvos might be a badge of honor of a sort, examples of a nervy truth-teller unafraid to call out bad books and overrated writers. No doubt, Poe was moved to puncture what he saw as the overinflated literary egos of the East Coast. He spent years writing harsh sketches of them for a series called "The Literati of New York City"-a supremely bad move for a writer hoping to make a living there. The twist, though, is that as a critic Poe often treated ethics as disposably as we do coffee filters. That self-dealing rave review is just one example. Poe plagiarized multiple times early in his career (most notably in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and "Usher"), but still spent much of 1845 leveling plagiarism accusations against Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Poe delivered his attacks under his own name, but also anonymously, and through an imaginary interlocutor named "Outis." But for all of Poe's bluster, evidence of Longfellow's thievery was thin, and the poet, wisely, didn't respond. "Poe's Longfellow war," said publisher Charles Briggs, who'd hired Poe at the Broadway Journal, "is all on one side."

Poe's obscurity as a critic is the reward of the hatchet-job man, some might say-conducting ill-tempered attacks on writers is an ugly and karmically inadvisable practice. (Just ask the ones who've been stung by a negative review.) But if the proper fate of the so-called hatchet job is to be banished to the memory hole, why are there so many enduring examples of the form? To highlight just a handful: In 1865, Henry James declared Walt Whitman's Drum-Taps "an offense against art." In 1895, Mark Twain savaged James Fenimore Cooper, stating that his work "has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality." In 1959, Norman Mailer swung at his contemporaries in an essay titled "Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room," aiming at the likes of J. D. Salinger ("the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school") and Jack Kerouac ("pretentious as a rich whore, as sentimental as a lollypop"). Dale Peck opened his 2002 review of a Rick Moody book by writing, "Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation." It went downhill from there.

Such pieces come quickly to mind to critics like myself, because the truth is-and it was a truth often lost on Poe-the critic who's accused of flinging hatchets is usually wielding a scalpel. The critic's job, in one regard, is to bring a sense of order to a chaotic literary world. Thousands of books are published every year, and somebody must do the job of sifting, sorting, and judging them with authority but without an agenda. That task has democratized in recent years, as readers on sites like Amazon and Goodreads hasten to champion a book or one-star it into the ether. But the old-fashioned critic has stuck around: A front-page rave on the cover of the New York Times Book Review can vault a book into the cultural conversation, and the literary prizes that critics are often called upon to judge can elevate a writer's reputation or cement it.

But it doesn't follow that a negative review is the opposite of a rave, at least from the perspective of that literary ordering; it's simply an inverted way of accomplishing the same task. That is, so long as it's done well, and to a purpose. Mailer's pronunciamentos in "Talent in the Room" were indisputably condescending and macho; absurdly, he found no women writers worth his attention. But there was no mistaking that he was tub-thumping for an American literature that took risks and emphasized hard realities underneath America's postwar largesse. Twain's takedown of Cooper, in both its content and form, was a pleading for American fiction to find its sense of humor and lose its clichéd ideas about wilderness writing, or writing in general. James disapproved of a poet who aspired to national stature via what James saw as Whitman's narcissism; Peck resented a writer so seduced by metaphor that it smothered intellectual precision.

And Poe-what mission stoked the fire of his negative reviews? Had he lived to read it, Poe might have appreciated Elizabeth Hardwick's 1959 attack on the timidity of book reviews at the time: "Sweet, bland commendations fall everywhere upon the scene; a universal, if somewhat lobotomized, accommodation reigns," she wrote. But the urge to fearlessly criticize is not the same thing as having strong ideas about what makes for good literature, and the frustrating thing about reading Poe's criticism is how often it is a closed circuit, concerned only with itself. The idea that a review might be a launchpad for broader statements was foreign if not offensive to him. "Criticism is not, we think, an essay, nor a sermon, nor an oration, nor a chapter in history, nor a philosophical speculation, nor a prose-poem, nor an art novel, nor a dialogue," he wrote in 1843. "In fact, it can be nothing in the world but-a criticism."

A number of his reviews open with a complaint that American writers were overly praised so as to distinguish them from the British colonizers from whose rule they had been free for only a few decades. Poe bemoaned "the gross paradox of liking a stupid book the better, because, sure enough, its stupidity is American." But thoughts about what would make for a distinct American literature didn't flow from Poe's busy pen. In the context of his reviews, such statements were usually throat-clearing before what he saw as the matter at hand: nit-picking about meter and rhyme in poetry, plot points in fiction, and word choice and grammar in both. Critics make arguments; Poe registered complaints. An extended 1837 essay on William Cullen Bryant's poetry finds Poe counting syllables and fussing over whether he might have better used the word "tomb" instead of "womb." Poe's own assessment of James Fenimore Cooper in 1843 turned literary criticism into a variant of an autopsy, assessing the sentence structure of one page of the book's preface, line by tediously palpated line. Where Twain was witty, Poe was charmless. Where other critics might look for themes and innovations in poetry, Poe assigned himself the job of America's toughest spondee cop.

Poe, in private, may have had a sense that this approach to criticism was fruitless. In an unfinished essay titled "A Reviewer Reviewed," one Walter G. Bowen, a pseudonym for Poe, critiqued Poe's reviewing style. "[His reviews] seem to me bitter in the extreme, captious, fault-finding, and unnecessarily severe," he wrote. "Real, honest, heartfelt praise is a thing not to be looked for in a criticism by Mr. Poe." Poe never finished the essay: It was found in a trunk among his possessions after his death. Perhaps a completed version would have revealed this display of self-loathing as just a performance, yet another example of Poe's piercing sarcasm. Yet it's hard not to think of Poe's classic story "The Tell-Tale Heart," where the narrator's urge to suppress the evidence of a violent past wars with his urge to confess it.

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And, overall, Poe wielded the kind of literary power that "can only be possessed by a man of high genius," according to the anonymous reviewer-who was almost certainly Edgar Allan Poe himself. Poe's reputation as a major American writer is unassailable.

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Edgar Allan Poe's stature as a major figure in world literature is primarily based on his ingenious and profound short stories, poems, and critical theories, which established a highly influential rationale for the short form in both poetry and fiction. Regarded in literary histories and handbooks as the architect of the modern short story, Poe was also the principal forerunner of the "art for art's sake" movement in 19th-century European literature. Whereas earlier critics predominantly concerned themselves with moral or ideological generalities, Poe focused his criticism on the specifics of style and construction that contributed to a work's effectiveness or failure. In his own work, he demonstrated a brilliant command of language and technique as well as an inspired and original imagination. Poe's poetry and short stories greatly influenced the French Symbolists of the late 19th century, who in turn altered the direction of modern literature.

Poe's father and mother were professional actors. At the time of his birth in 1809, they were members of a repertory company in Boston. Before Poe was three years old both of his parents died, and he was raised in the home of John Allan, a prosperous exporter from Richmond, Virginia, who never legally adopted his foster son. As a boy, Poe attended the best schools available, and was admitted to the University of Virginia at Charlottesville in 1825. While there he distinguished himself academically but was forced to leave after less than a year because of bad debts and inadequate financial support from Allan. Poe's relationship with Allan disintegrated upon his return to Richmond in 1827, and soon after Poe left for Boston, where he enlisted in the army and also published his first poetry collection, Tamerlane, and Other Poems. The volume went unnoticed by readers and reviewers, and a second collection, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, received only slightly more attention when it appeared in 1829. That same year Poe was honorably discharged from the army, having attained the rank of regimental sergeant major, and was then admitted to the United States Military Academy at West Point. However, because Allan would neither provide his foster son with sufficient funds to maintain himself as a cadet nor give the consent necessary to resign from the Academy, Poe gained a dismissal by ignoring his duties and violating regulations. He subsequently went to New York City, where Poems, his third collection of verse, was published in 1831, and then to Baltimore, where he lived at the home of his aunt, Mrs. Maria Clemm.

Over the next few years Poe's first short stories appeared in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier and his "MS. Found in a Bottle" won a cash prize for best story in the Baltimore Saturday Visitor. Nevertheless, Poe was still not earning enough to live independently, nor did Allan's death in 1834 provide him with an inheritance. The following year, however, his financial problems were temporarily alleviated when he accepted an editorship at The Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, bringing with him his aunt and his 12-year-old cousin Virginia, whom he married in 1836. The Southern Literary Messenger was the first of several journals Poe would direct over the next 10 years and through which he rose to prominence as a leading man of letters in America. Poe made himself known not only as a superlative author of poetry and fiction, but also as a literary critic whose level of imagination and insight had hitherto been unapproached in American literature. While Poe's writings gained attention in the late 1830s and early 1840s, the profits from his work remained meager, and he supported himself by editing Burton's Gentleman's Magazine and Graham's Magazine in Philadelphia and the Broadway Journal in New York City. After his wife's death from tuberculosis in 1847, Poe became involved in a number of romantic affairs. It was while he prepared for his second marriage that Poe, for reasons unknown, arrived in Baltimore in late September of 1849. On October 3, he was discovered in a state of semi-consciousness; he died four days later without regaining the necessary lucidity to explain what had happened during the last days of his life.

Poe's most conspicuous contribution to world literature derives from the analytical method he practiced both as a creative author and as a critic of the works of his contemporaries. His self-declared intention was to formulate strictly artistic ideals in a milieu that he thought overly concerned with the utilitarian value of literature, a tendency he termed the "heresy of the Didactic." While Poe's position includes the chief requisites of pure aestheticism, his emphasis on literary formalism was directly linked to his philosophical ideals: through the calculated use of language one may express, though always imperfectly, a vision of truth and the essential condition of human existence. Poe's theory of literary creation is noted for two central points: first, a work must create a unity of effect on the reader to be considered successful; second, the production of this single effect should not be left to the hazards of accident or inspiration, but should to the minutest detail of style and subject be the result of rational deliberation on the part of the author. In poetry, this single effect must arouse the reader's sense of beauty, an ideal that Poe closely associated with sadness, strangeness, and loss; in prose, the effect should be one revelatory of some truth, as in "tales of ratiocination" or works evoking "terror, or passion, or horror."

Aside from a common theoretical basis, there is a psychological intensity that is characteristic of Poe's writings, especially the tales of horror that comprise his best and best-known works. These stories-which include "The Black Cat," "The Cask of Amontillado," and "The Tell-Tale Heart"-are often told by a first-person narrator, and through this voice Poe probes the workings of a character's psyche. This technique foreshadows the psychological explorations of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the school of psychological realism. In his Gothic tales, Poe also employed an essentially symbolic, almost allegorical method which gives such works as "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Masque of the Red Death," and "Ligeia" an enigmatic quality that accounts for their enduring interest and links them with the symbolical works of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. The influence of Poe's tales may be seen in the work of later writers, including Ambrose Bierce and H.P. Lovecraft, who belong to a distinct tradition of horror literature initiated by Poe. In addition to his achievement as creator of the modern horror tale, Poe is also credited with parenting two other popular genres: science fiction and the detective story. In such works as "The Unparalleled Adventure of Hans Pfaall" and "Von Kempelen and His Discovery," Poe took advantage of the fascination for science and technology that emerged in the early 19th century to produce speculative and fantastic narratives which anticipate a type of literature that did not become widely practiced until the 20th century. Similarly, Poe's three tales of ratiocination-"The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Purloined Letter," and "The Mystery of Marie Roget"-are recognized as the models which established the major characters and literary conventions of detective fiction, specifically the amateur sleuth who solves a crime that has confounded the authorities and whose feats of deductive reasoning are documented by an admiring associate. Just as Poe influenced many succeeding authors and is regarded as an ancestor of such major literary movements as Symbolism and Surrealism, he was also influenced by earlier literary figures and movements. In his use of the demonic and the grotesque, Poe evidenced the impact of the stories of E.T.A. Hoffman and the Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe, while the despair and melancholy in much of his writing reflects an affinity with the Romantic movement of the early 19th century. It was Poe's particular genius that in his work he gave consummate artistic form both to his personal obsessions and those of previous literary generations, at the same time creating new forms which provided a means of expression for future artists.

While Poe is most often remembered for his short fiction, his first love as a writer was poetry, which he began writing during his adolescence. His early verse reflects the influence of such English romantics as Lord Byron, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, yet foreshadows his later poetry which demonstrates a subjective outlook and surreal, mystic vision. "Tamerlane" and "Al Aaraaf" exemplify Poe's evolution from the portrayal of Byronic heroes to the depiction of journeys within his own imagination and subconscious. The former piece, reminiscent of Byron's "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," recounts the life and adventures of a 14th-century Mongol conqueror; the latter poem portrays a dreamworld where neither good nor evil permanently reside and where absolute beauty can be directly discerned. In other poems-" To Helen," "Lenore," and " The Raven" in particular-Poe investigates the loss of ideal beauty and the difficulty in regaining it. These pieces are usually narrated by a young man who laments the untimely death of his beloved. "To Helen" is a three stanza lyric that has been called one of the most beautiful love poems in the English language. The subject of the work is a woman who becomes, in the eyes of the narrator, a personification of the classical beauty of ancient Greece and Rome. "Lenore" presents ways in which the dead are best remembered, either by mourning or celebrating life beyond earthly boundaries. In "The Raven," Poe successfully unites his philosophical and aesthetic ideals. In this psychological piece, a young scholar is emotionally tormented by a raven's ominous repetition of "Nevermore" in answer to his question about the probability of an afterlife with his deceased lover. Charles Baudelaire noted in his introduction to the French edition of "The Raven": "It is indeed the poem of the sleeplessness of despair; it lacks nothing: neither the fever of ideas, nor the violence of colors, nor sickly reasoning, nor drivelling terror, nor even the bizarre gaiety of suffering which makes it more terrible." Poe also wrote poems that were intended to be read aloud. Experimenting with combinations of sound and rhythm, he employed such technical devices as repetition, parallelism, internal rhyme, alliteration, and assonance to produce works that are unique in American poetry for their haunting, musical quality. In "The Bells," for example, the repetition of the word "bells" in various structures accentuates the unique tonality of the different types of bells described in the poem.

While his works were not conspicuously acclaimed during his lifetime, Poe did earn due respect as a gifted fiction writer, poet, and man of letters, and occasionally he achieved a measure of popular success, especially following the appearance of " The Raven." After his death, however, the history of his critical reception becomes one of dramatically uneven judgments and interpretations. This state of affairs was initiated by Poe's one-time friend and literary executor R.W. Griswold, who, in a libelous obituary notice in the New York Tribune bearing the byline "Ludwig," attributed the depravity and psychological aberrations of many of the characters in Poe's fiction to Poe himself. In retrospect, Griswold's vilifications seem ultimately to have elicited as much sympathy as censure with respect to Poe and his work, leading subsequent biographers of the late 19th century to defend, sometimes too devotedly, Poe's name. It was not until the 1941 biography by A.H. Quinn that a balanced view was provided of Poe, his work, and the relationship between the author's life and his imagination. Nevertheless, the identification of Poe with the murderers and madmen of his works survived and flourished in the 20th century, most prominently in the form of psychoanalytical studies such as those of Marie Bonaparte and Joseph Wood Krutch. Added to the controversy over the sanity, or at best the maturity of Poe (Paul Elmer More called him "the poet of unripe boys and unsound men"), was the question of the value of Poe's works as serious literature. At the forefront of Poe's detractors were such eminent figures as Henry James, Aldous Huxley, and T.S. Eliot, who dismissed Poe's works as juvenile, vulgar, and artistically debased; in contrast, these same works have been judged to be of the highest literary merit by such writers as Bernard Shaw and William Carlos Williams. Complementing Poe's erratic reputation among English and American critics is the more stable, and generally more elevated opinion of critics elsewhere in the world, particularly in France. Following the extensive translations and commentaries of Charles Baudelaire in the 1850s, Poe's works were received with a peculiar esteem by French writers, most profoundly those associated with the late 19th-century movement of Symbolism, who admired Poe's transcendent aspirations as a poet; the 20th-century movement of Surrealism, which valued Poe's bizarre and apparently unruled imagination; and such figures as Paul Valéry, who found in Poe's theories and thought an ideal of supreme rationalism. In other countries, Poe's works have enjoyed a similar regard, and numerous studies have been written tracing the influence of the American author on the international literary scene, especially in Russia, Japan, Scandinavia, and Latin America.

Today, Poe is recognized as one of the foremost progenitors of modern literature, both in its popular forms, such as horror and detective fiction, and in its more complex and self-conscious forms, which represent the essential artistic manner of the 20th century. In contrast to earlier critics who viewed the man and his works as one, criticism of the past 25 years has developed a view of Poe as a detached artist who was more concerned with displaying his virtuosity than with expressing his soul, and who maintained an ironic rather than an autobiographical relationship to his writings. While at one time critics such as Yvor Winters wished to remove Poe from literary history, his works remain integral to any conception of modernism in world literature. Herbert Marshall McLuhan wrote in an essay entitled "Edgar Poe's Tradition": "While the New England dons primly turned the pages of Plato and Buddha beside a tea-cozy, and while Browning and Tennyson were creating a parochial fog for the English mind to relax in, Poe never lost contact with the terrible pathos of his time. Coevally with Baudelaire, and long before Conrad and Eliot, he explored the heart of darkness."

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Edgar Allan Poe's stature as a major figure in world literature is primarily based on his ingenious and profound short stories, poems, and critical theories, which established a highly influential rationale for the short form in both poetry and fiction. Regarded in literary histories and handbooks...

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Edgar Poe was born on January 19th, 1809 to traveling actors Eliza and David Poe. When Edgar was a baby, David abandoned the family, leaving Eliza to support three young children. In a devastating turn, Eliza contracted tuberculosis and spent the last few months of her life in Richmond. She died on December 8th, 1811 at the age of 24, leaving behind her three children. Two-year-old Edgar was taken in by Richmond couple John and Frances Allan. Edgar was never officially adopted, a cause and result of constant tensions between him and his foster father. He did not take their last name, but instead he became Edgar Allan Poe. As a teenager Poe enjoyed the life of the elite upper-class.

In 1824, a young Edgar Allan Poe was a part of a junior honor color guard that escorted the Revolutionary War General Marquis de Lafayette around Richmond, Virginia. Lafayette and the color guard stopped at Richmond's Old Stone House to visit the Ege family, who had assisted in the American Revolution. Poe stood guard on the front steps of the house. 98 years later, the Old Stone House became the Poe Museum.

At the age of 17, Edgar traveled to Charlottesville to attend the University of Virginia (UVA). He left behind a fiancé, Elmira Royster, who promised to wait until after graduation to marry. Edgar almost immediately ran into trouble at UVA. Although he was a talented student, he had arrived at college with only $110 for tuition. UVA's tuition was three times that, so he decided to gamble to raise the rest of the funds. Instead, Edgar generated $2,000 worth of debt. After just a couple months at UVA, he returned to Richmond disappointed and continued to feud with his foster father. To make matters worse, Elmira had become engaged to someone else. While Edgar was off at UVA, Elmira's father had intercepted Edgar's letters and steered her in the direction of another man who promised to be a successful businessman and a respectable citizen, something Edgar could not promise.

Poe then moved to Boston. He didn't stay long, but during that time he published his first book of poetry "Tamerlane and Other Poems" under the pseudonym "A Bostonian." When Poe was 18 he joined the army under the name "Edgar Perry." Poe did exceptionally well in the army, rising to the rank of sergeant major in just two years. He then went to West Point, where once again he did well academically, but ran into financial issues. Poe was court marshalled for extreme dereliction of duty. He then moved to Baltimore.

In Baltimore Poe lived with several relatives, including his aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter, Virginia. Poe lived in Baltimore for four years, during which time he shifted from writing poetry to short stories. One publication that took special interest in him was the Southern Literary Messenger based in Richmond, Virginia. Poe published "Metzengerstein" which is considered his first horror story, and "Berenice" which was so graphic and terrifying that the magazine received multiple complaints from readers. Editor Thomas White offered Poe a job on the staff of the Messenger. Poe agreed and moved back to Richmond.

Soon after Poe joined the Southern Literary Messenger, he and White began to have issues, the root of which perhaps came from Poe's drinking. Poe invited his aunt and cousin, Maria and Virgina to live with him in Richmond. One year later, Poe and Virginia then got married. She was 13, he was 27. This is an unlikely pairing and there is much debate about the nature of their relationship. Poe often referred to Virginia as "sissy" (sister) and Maria as "Muddy" (mother). Although many people today presume their relationship was familial, we ultimately will never know what happened in their marriage behind closed doors. Virginia and Maria had a stabilizing effect on Poe. He seemed to be more responsible and happier during the years when they were with him.

In 1837 Poe left the Southern Literary Messenger and Richmond. Starting in 1838 while living in Philadelphia, he enjoyed his prime years of literature. Poe wrote "The Tell-Tale Heart," the "Masque of the Red Death," "The Black Cat," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Gold Bug," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and more.

"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is particularly important because it was the first modern detective story. Poe was the first to write about an eccentric genius who solves mysterious crimes. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle cites Poe's character, C. Auguste Dupin, as the literary inspiration behind his character, Sherlock Holmes. Poe was also an early pioneer of science fiction. Interestingly, the majority of his stories are comedies.

Poe wrote in many genres, but his contribution to horror is what makes him famous today. Poe revolutionized the genre. He was one of the first to involve deep, intuitive, psychological horror. He often wrote stories where the true monster was the capacity for evil that is inside each person, and what happens when that evil is acted upon.

Poe's most famous piece is "The Raven." Once published, in the early months of 1845, this poem made him an overnight success.Before the publication, Poe was well known in literary circles, but because of "The Raven" Edgar Allan Poe became a household name. Although Poe only made around $15 from the publication of "The Raven," its international success created financial opportunities like taking on literary clients and giving lectures and recitations. Poe was the first American writer to live completely off of his earnings from writing. But for most of Poe's adulthood, he struggled to financially support himself and his family.

Unfortunately, by this time, his wife Virginia began exhibiting symptoms of tuberculosis. She was sick for several years and died in 1847 while the couple lived in New York. Virginia was 24 years old when she died. Poe never emotionally recovered from the death of his wife. It was evident that he relied on her for mental and emotional support. Poe began to drift back south towards the city of his childhood: Richmond.

Elmira Royster Shelton

While in Richmond, Poe rekindled his childhood romance with Elmira Royster Shelton, who was then a wealthy widow. At the dismay of her children, she and Poe once again became engaged in 1849. Poe planned to move permanently to Richmond to be with Elmira. He planned a trip to New York to bring Maria (his mother-in-law) back to Richmond. He was also planning to see a client in Philadelphia on the way up the coast.

Poe's last day in Richmond was on September 26th, 1849. Elmira was worried about his health. After his bout of cholera, his health had been quite fragile. She encouraged Poe to visit his doctor who is also a friend. Poe did, but it was primarily a social visit. He had a late meal at Sadler's Restaurant. And at 4am on September 27th, 1849, Poe boarded a ship headed for Baltimore. From September 27th until October 3rd, there is no record of his whereabouts.

On October 3rd, an election day, Poe was found delirious in a tavern called Gunner's Hall in Baltimore. He appeared drunk, wearing someone else's clothes and was taken to Washington University Hospital. For the next four days he was in and out of consciousness, sometimes being alert, sometimes screaming at nothing and no one.

Edgar Allan Poe died on October 7th, 1849. The doctor labeled his cause of death as "phrenitis" (inflammation of the brain) which was commonly used when the true cause of death was unknown. Because of these mysterious circumstances, and the persona of Poe, there is much speculation about the true manner of his death. There are over 26 published theories on his demise, so far.

Poe's death, although untimely and unfortunate, was quite the fitting end for a writer who created stories of true horror and mystery. Even in death, Edgar Allan Poe created a mystery that would live on forever.

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Edgar Poe was born on January 19th, 1809 to traveling actors Eliza and David Poe. When Edgar was a baby, David abandoned the family, leaving Eliza to support three young children. In a devastating turn, Eliza contracted tuberculosis and spent the last few months of her life in Richmond.

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Edgar Allan Poe - Gothic, Horror, Poetry

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Edgar Allan Poe - Gothic, Horror, Poetry: Poe’s work owes much to the concern of Romanticism with the occult and the satanic. It owes much also to his own feverish dreams, to which he applied a rare faculty of shaping plausible fabrics out of impalpable materials. With an air of objectivity and spontaneity, his productions are closely dependent on his own powers of imagination and an elaborate technique. His keen and sound judgment as an appraiser of contemporary literature, his idealism and musical gift as a poet, his dramatic art as a storyteller, considerably appreciated in his lifetime, secured him a prominent place among universally known men

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His themes included death, regret, and lost love

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Edgar Allan Poe's stature as a major figure in world literature is primarily based on his ingenious and profound short stories, poems, and critical theories, which established a highly influential rationale for the short form in both poetry and fiction. Regarded in literary histories and handbooks as the architect of the modern short story, Poe was also the principal forerunner of the "art for art's sake" movement in 19th-century European literature. Whereas earlier critics predominantly concerned themselves with moral or ideological generalities, Poe focused his criticism on the specifics of style and construction that contributed to a work's effectiveness or failure. In his own work, he demonstrated a brilliant command of language and technique as well as an inspired and original imagination. Poe's poetry and short stories greatly influenced the French Symbolists of the late 19th century, who in turn altered the direction of modern literature.

Poe's father and mother were professional actors. At the time of his birth in 1809, they were members of a repertory company in Boston. Before Poe was three years old both of his parents died, and he was raised in the home of John Allan, a prosperous exporter from Richmond, Virginia, who never legally adopted his foster son. As a boy, Poe attended the best schools available, and was admitted to the University of Virginia at Charlottesville in 1825. While there he distinguished himself academically but was forced to leave after less than a year because of bad debts and inadequate financial support from Allan. Poe's relationship with Allan disintegrated upon his return to Richmond in 1827, and soon after Poe left for Boston, where he enlisted in the army and also published his first poetry collection, Tamerlane, and Other Poems. The volume went unnoticed by readers and reviewers, and a second collection, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, received only slightly more attention when it appeared in 1829. That same year Poe was honorably discharged from the army, having attained the rank of regimental sergeant major, and was then admitted to the United States Military Academy at West Point. However, because Allan would neither provide his foster son with sufficient funds to maintain himself as a cadet nor give the consent necessary to resign from the Academy, Poe gained a dismissal by ignoring his duties and violating regulations. He subsequently went to New York City, where Poems, his third collection of verse, was published in 1831, and then to Baltimore, where he lived at the home of his aunt, Mrs. Maria Clemm.

Over the next few years Poe's first short stories appeared in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier and his "MS. Found in a Bottle" won a cash prize for best story in the Baltimore Saturday Visitor. Nevertheless, Poe was still not earning enough to live independently, nor did Allan's death in 1834 provide him with an inheritance. The following year, however, his financial problems were temporarily alleviated when he accepted an editorship at The Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, bringing with him his aunt and his 12-year-old cousin Virginia, whom he married in 1836. The Southern Literary Messenger was the first of several journals Poe would direct over the next 10 years and through which he rose to prominence as a leading man of letters in America. Poe made himself known not only as a superlative author of poetry and fiction, but also as a literary critic whose level of imagination and insight had hitherto been unapproached in American literature. While Poe's writings gained attention in the late 1830s and early 1840s, the profits from his work remained meager, and he supported himself by editing Burton's Gentleman's Magazine and Graham's Magazine in Philadelphia and the Broadway Journal in New York City. After his wife's death from tuberculosis in 1847, Poe became involved in a number of romantic affairs. It was while he prepared for his second marriage that Poe, for reasons unknown, arrived in Baltimore in late September of 1849. On October 3, he was discovered in a state of semi-consciousness; he died four days later without regaining the necessary lucidity to explain what had happened during the last days of his life.

Poe's most conspicuous contribution to world literature derives from the analytical method he practiced both as a creative author and as a critic of the works of his contemporaries. His self-declared intention was to formulate strictly artistic ideals in a milieu that he thought overly concerned with the utilitarian value of literature, a tendency he termed the "heresy of the Didactic." While Poe's position includes the chief requisites of pure aestheticism, his emphasis on literary formalism was directly linked to his philosophical ideals: through the calculated use of language one may express, though always imperfectly, a vision of truth and the essential condition of human existence. Poe's theory of literary creation is noted for two central points: first, a work must create a unity of effect on the reader to be considered successful; second, the production of this single effect should not be left to the hazards of accident or inspiration, but should to the minutest detail of style and subject be the result of rational deliberation on the part of the author. In poetry, this single effect must arouse the reader's sense of beauty, an ideal that Poe closely associated with sadness, strangeness, and loss; in prose, the effect should be one revelatory of some truth, as in "tales of ratiocination" or works evoking "terror, or passion, or horror."

Aside from a common theoretical basis, there is a psychological intensity that is characteristic of Poe's writings, especially the tales of horror that comprise his best and best-known works. These stories-which include "The Black Cat," "The Cask of Amontillado," and "The Tell-Tale Heart"-are often told by a first-person narrator, and through this voice Poe probes the workings of a character's psyche. This technique foreshadows the psychological explorations of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the school of psychological realism. In his Gothic tales, Poe also employed an essentially symbolic, almost allegorical method which gives such works as "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Masque of the Red Death," and "Ligeia" an enigmatic quality that accounts for their enduring interest and links them with the symbolical works of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. The influence of Poe's tales may be seen in the work of later writers, including Ambrose Bierce and H.P. Lovecraft, who belong to a distinct tradition of horror literature initiated by Poe. In addition to his achievement as creator of the modern horror tale, Poe is also credited with parenting two other popular genres: science fiction and the detective story. In such works as "The Unparalleled Adventure of Hans Pfaall" and "Von Kempelen and His Discovery," Poe took advantage of the fascination for science and technology that emerged in the early 19th century to produce speculative and fantastic narratives which anticipate a type of literature that did not become widely practiced until the 20th century. Similarly, Poe's three tales of ratiocination-"The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Purloined Letter," and "The Mystery of Marie Roget"-are recognized as the models which established the major characters and literary conventions of detective fiction, specifically the amateur sleuth who solves a crime that has confounded the authorities and whose feats of deductive reasoning are documented by an admiring associate. Just as Poe influenced many succeeding authors and is regarded as an ancestor of such major literary movements as Symbolism and Surrealism, he was also influenced by earlier literary figures and movements. In his use of the demonic and the grotesque, Poe evidenced the impact of the stories of E.T.A. Hoffman and the Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe, while the despair and melancholy in much of his writing reflects an affinity with the Romantic movement of the early 19th century. It was Poe's particular genius that in his work he gave consummate artistic form both to his personal obsessions and those of previous literary generations, at the same time creating new forms which provided a means of expression for future artists.

While Poe is most often remembered for his short fiction, his first love as a writer was poetry, which he began writing during his adolescence. His early verse reflects the influence of such English romantics as Lord Byron, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, yet foreshadows his later poetry which demonstrates a subjective outlook and surreal, mystic vision. "Tamerlane" and "Al Aaraaf" exemplify Poe's evolution from the portrayal of Byronic heroes to the depiction of journeys within his own imagination and subconscious. The former piece, reminiscent of Byron's "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," recounts the life and adventures of a 14th-century Mongol conqueror; the latter poem portrays a dreamworld where neither good nor evil permanently reside and where absolute beauty can be directly discerned. In other poems-" To Helen," "Lenore," and " The Raven" in particular-Poe investigates the loss of ideal beauty and the difficulty in regaining it. These pieces are usually narrated by a young man who laments the untimely death of his beloved. "To Helen" is a three stanza lyric that has been called one of the most beautiful love poems in the English language. The subject of the work is a woman who becomes, in the eyes of the narrator, a personification of the classical beauty of ancient Greece and Rome. "Lenore" presents ways in which the dead are best remembered, either by mourning or celebrating life beyond earthly boundaries. In "The Raven," Poe successfully unites his philosophical and aesthetic ideals. In this psychological piece, a young scholar is emotionally tormented by a raven's ominous repetition of "Nevermore" in answer to his question about the probability of an afterlife with his deceased lover. Charles Baudelaire noted in his introduction to the French edition of "The Raven": "It is indeed the poem of the sleeplessness of despair; it lacks nothing: neither the fever of ideas, nor the violence of colors, nor sickly reasoning, nor drivelling terror, nor even the bizarre gaiety of suffering which makes it more terrible." Poe also wrote poems that were intended to be read aloud. Experimenting with combinations of sound and rhythm, he employed such technical devices as repetition, parallelism, internal rhyme, alliteration, and assonance to produce works that are unique in American poetry for their haunting, musical quality. In "The Bells," for example, the repetition of the word "bells" in various structures accentuates the unique tonality of the different types of bells described in the poem.

While his works were not conspicuously acclaimed during his lifetime, Poe did earn due respect as a gifted fiction writer, poet, and man of letters, and occasionally he achieved a measure of popular success, especially following the appearance of " The Raven." After his death, however, the history of his critical reception becomes one of dramatically uneven judgments and interpretations. This state of affairs was initiated by Poe's one-time friend and literary executor R.W. Griswold, who, in a libelous obituary notice in the New York Tribune bearing the byline "Ludwig," attributed the depravity and psychological aberrations of many of the characters in Poe's fiction to Poe himself. In retrospect, Griswold's vilifications seem ultimately to have elicited as much sympathy as censure with respect to Poe and his work, leading subsequent biographers of the late 19th century to defend, sometimes too devotedly, Poe's name. It was not until the 1941 biography by A.H. Quinn that a balanced view was provided of Poe, his work, and the relationship between the author's life and his imagination. Nevertheless, the identification of Poe with the murderers and madmen of his works survived and flourished in the 20th century, most prominently in the form of psychoanalytical studies such as those of Marie Bonaparte and Joseph Wood Krutch. Added to the controversy over the sanity, or at best the maturity of Poe (Paul Elmer More called him "the poet of unripe boys and unsound men"), was the question of the value of Poe's works as serious literature. At the forefront of Poe's detractors were such eminent figures as Henry James, Aldous Huxley, and T.S. Eliot, who dismissed Poe's works as juvenile, vulgar, and artistically debased; in contrast, these same works have been judged to be of the highest literary merit by such writers as Bernard Shaw and William Carlos Williams. Complementing Poe's erratic reputation among English and American critics is the more stable, and generally more elevated opinion of critics elsewhere in the world, particularly in France. Following the extensive translations and commentaries of Charles Baudelaire in the 1850s, Poe's works were received with a peculiar esteem by French writers, most profoundly those associated with the late 19th-century movement of Symbolism, who admired Poe's transcendent aspirations as a poet; the 20th-century movement of Surrealism, which valued Poe's bizarre and apparently unruled imagination; and such figures as Paul Valéry, who found in Poe's theories and thought an ideal of supreme rationalism. In other countries, Poe's works have enjoyed a similar regard, and numerous studies have been written tracing the influence of the American author on the international literary scene, especially in Russia, Japan, Scandinavia, and Latin America.

Today, Poe is recognized as one of the foremost progenitors of modern literature, both in its popular forms, such as horror and detective fiction, and in its more complex and self-conscious forms, which represent the essential artistic manner of the 20th century. In contrast to earlier critics who viewed the man and his works as one, criticism of the past 25 years has developed a view of Poe as a detached artist who was more concerned with displaying his virtuosity than with expressing his soul, and who maintained an ironic rather than an autobiographical relationship to his writings. While at one time critics such as Yvor Winters wished to remove Poe from literary history, his works remain integral to any conception of modernism in world literature. Herbert Marshall McLuhan wrote in an essay entitled "Edgar Poe's Tradition": "While the New England dons primly turned the pages of Plato and Buddha beside a tea-cozy, and while Browning and Tennyson were creating a parochial fog for the English mind to relax in, Poe never lost contact with the terrible pathos of his time. Coevally with Baudelaire, and long before Conrad and Eliot, he explored the heart of darkness."

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Edgar Allan Poe's stature as a major figure in world literature is primarily based on his ingenious and profound short stories, poems, and critical theories, which established a highly influential rationale for the short form in both poetry and fiction. Regarded in literary histories and handbooks...

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Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809, in Boston. Poe's father and mother, both professional actors, died before the poet was three years old, and John and Frances Allan raised him as a foster child in Richmond, Virginia. John Allan, a prosperous tobacco exporter, sent Poe to the best boarding schools and, later, to the University of Virginia, where Poe excelled academically. After less than one year of school, however, he was forced to leave the university when Allan refused to pay Poe's gambling debts.

Poe returned briefly to Richmond, but his relationship with Allan deteriorated. In 1827, Poe moved to Boston and enlisted in the United States Army. His first collection of poems, Tamerlane, and Other Poems (George Redway), was published that year. In 1829, he published a second collection entitled Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (Hatch & Dunning). Neither volume received significant critical or public attention. Following his Army service, Poe was admitted to the United States Military Academy, but he was again forced to leave for lack of financial support. He then moved into the home of his aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter, Virginia, in Baltimore.

Poe began to sell short stories to magazines at around this time, and, in 1835, he became the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, where he moved with his aunt and cousin Virginia. In 1836, he married Virginia, who was thirteen years old at the time. Over the next ten years, Poe would edit a number of literary journals including the Burton's Gentleman's Magazine and Graham's Magazine in Philadelphia and the Broadway Journal in New York City. It was during these years that he established himself as a poet, a short story writer, and an editor. He published some of his best-known stories and poems, including "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and "The Raven." After Virginia's death from tuberculosis in 1847, Poe's lifelong struggle with depression and alcoholism worsened. He returned briefly to Richmond in 1849 and then set out for an editing job in Philadelphia. For unknown reasons, he stopped in Baltimore. On October 3, 1849, he was found in a state of semi-consciousness. Poe died four days later of "acute congestion of the brain." Evidence by medical practitioners who reopened the case has shown that Poe may have been suffering from rabies.

Poe's work as an editor, poet, and critic had a profound impact on American and international literature. His stories mark him as one of the originators of both horror and detective fiction. Many anthologies credit him as the "architect" of the modern short story. He was also one of the first critics to focus primarily on the effect of style and structure in a literary work; as such, he has been seen as a forerunner to the "art for art's sake" movement. French Symbolists such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Arthur Rimbaud claimed him as a literary precursor. Charles Baudelaire spent nearly fourteen years translating Poe into French. Today, Poe is remembered as one of the first American writers to become a major figure in world literature.

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Edgar Allan Poe - Born in 1809, Edgar Allan Poe had a profound impact on American and international literature as an editor, poet, and critic.

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Edgar Poe was born on January 19th, 1809 to traveling actors Eliza and David Poe. When Edgar was a baby, David abandoned the family, leaving Eliza to support three young children. In a devastating turn, Eliza contracted tuberculosis and spent the last few months of her life in Richmond. She died on December 8th, 1811 at the age of 24, leaving behind her three children. Two-year-old Edgar was taken in by Richmond couple John and Frances Allan. Edgar was never officially adopted, a cause and result of constant tensions between him and his foster father. He did not take their last name, but instead he became Edgar Allan Poe. As a teenager Poe enjoyed the life of the elite upper-class.

In 1824, a young Edgar Allan Poe was a part of a junior honor color guard that escorted the Revolutionary War General Marquis de Lafayette around Richmond, Virginia. Lafayette and the color guard stopped at Richmond's Old Stone House to visit the Ege family, who had assisted in the American Revolution. Poe stood guard on the front steps of the house. 98 years later, the Old Stone House became the Poe Museum.

At the age of 17, Edgar traveled to Charlottesville to attend the University of Virginia (UVA). He left behind a fiancé, Elmira Royster, who promised to wait until after graduation to marry. Edgar almost immediately ran into trouble at UVA. Although he was a talented student, he had arrived at college with only $110 for tuition. UVA's tuition was three times that, so he decided to gamble to raise the rest of the funds. Instead, Edgar generated $2,000 worth of debt. After just a couple months at UVA, he returned to Richmond disappointed and continued to feud with his foster father. To make matters worse, Elmira had become engaged to someone else. While Edgar was off at UVA, Elmira's father had intercepted Edgar's letters and steered her in the direction of another man who promised to be a successful businessman and a respectable citizen, something Edgar could not promise.

Poe then moved to Boston. He didn't stay long, but during that time he published his first book of poetry "Tamerlane and Other Poems" under the pseudonym "A Bostonian." When Poe was 18 he joined the army under the name "Edgar Perry." Poe did exceptionally well in the army, rising to the rank of sergeant major in just two years. He then went to West Point, where once again he did well academically, but ran into financial issues. Poe was court marshalled for extreme dereliction of duty. He then moved to Baltimore.

In Baltimore Poe lived with several relatives, including his aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter, Virginia. Poe lived in Baltimore for four years, during which time he shifted from writing poetry to short stories. One publication that took special interest in him was the Southern Literary Messenger based in Richmond, Virginia. Poe published "Metzengerstein" which is considered his first horror story, and "Berenice" which was so graphic and terrifying that the magazine received multiple complaints from readers. Editor Thomas White offered Poe a job on the staff of the Messenger. Poe agreed and moved back to Richmond.

Soon after Poe joined the Southern Literary Messenger, he and White began to have issues, the root of which perhaps came from Poe's drinking. Poe invited his aunt and cousin, Maria and Virgina to live with him in Richmond. One year later, Poe and Virginia then got married. She was 13, he was 27. This is an unlikely pairing and there is much debate about the nature of their relationship. Poe often referred to Virginia as "sissy" (sister) and Maria as "Muddy" (mother). Although many people today presume their relationship was familial, we ultimately will never know what happened in their marriage behind closed doors. Virginia and Maria had a stabilizing effect on Poe. He seemed to be more responsible and happier during the years when they were with him.

In 1837 Poe left the Southern Literary Messenger and Richmond. Starting in 1838 while living in Philadelphia, he enjoyed his prime years of literature. Poe wrote "The Tell-Tale Heart," the "Masque of the Red Death," "The Black Cat," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Gold Bug," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and more.

"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is particularly important because it was the first modern detective story. Poe was the first to write about an eccentric genius who solves mysterious crimes. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle cites Poe's character, C. Auguste Dupin, as the literary inspiration behind his character, Sherlock Holmes. Poe was also an early pioneer of science fiction. Interestingly, the majority of his stories are comedies.

Poe wrote in many genres, but his contribution to horror is what makes him famous today. Poe revolutionized the genre. He was one of the first to involve deep, intuitive, psychological horror. He often wrote stories where the true monster was the capacity for evil that is inside each person, and what happens when that evil is acted upon.

Poe's most famous piece is "The Raven." Once published, in the early months of 1845, this poem made him an overnight success.Before the publication, Poe was well known in literary circles, but because of "The Raven" Edgar Allan Poe became a household name. Although Poe only made around $15 from the publication of "The Raven," its international success created financial opportunities like taking on literary clients and giving lectures and recitations. Poe was the first American writer to live completely off of his earnings from writing. But for most of Poe's adulthood, he struggled to financially support himself and his family.

Unfortunately, by this time, his wife Virginia began exhibiting symptoms of tuberculosis. She was sick for several years and died in 1847 while the couple lived in New York. Virginia was 24 years old when she died. Poe never emotionally recovered from the death of his wife. It was evident that he relied on her for mental and emotional support. Poe began to drift back south towards the city of his childhood: Richmond.

Elmira Royster Shelton

While in Richmond, Poe rekindled his childhood romance with Elmira Royster Shelton, who was then a wealthy widow. At the dismay of her children, she and Poe once again became engaged in 1849. Poe planned to move permanently to Richmond to be with Elmira. He planned a trip to New York to bring Maria (his mother-in-law) back to Richmond. He was also planning to see a client in Philadelphia on the way up the coast.

Poe's last day in Richmond was on September 26th, 1849. Elmira was worried about his health. After his bout of cholera, his health had been quite fragile. She encouraged Poe to visit his doctor who is also a friend. Poe did, but it was primarily a social visit. He had a late meal at Sadler's Restaurant. And at 4am on September 27th, 1849, Poe boarded a ship headed for Baltimore. From September 27th until October 3rd, there is no record of his whereabouts.

On October 3rd, an election day, Poe was found delirious in a tavern called Gunner's Hall in Baltimore. He appeared drunk, wearing someone else's clothes and was taken to Washington University Hospital. For the next four days he was in and out of consciousness, sometimes being alert, sometimes screaming at nothing and no one.

Edgar Allan Poe died on October 7th, 1849. The doctor labeled his cause of death as "phrenitis" (inflammation of the brain) which was commonly used when the true cause of death was unknown. Because of these mysterious circumstances, and the persona of Poe, there is much speculation about the true manner of his death. There are over 26 published theories on his demise, so far.

Poe's death, although untimely and unfortunate, was quite the fitting end for a writer who created stories of true horror and mystery. Even in death, Edgar Allan Poe created a mystery that would live on forever.

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Edgar Poe was born on January 19th, 1809 to traveling actors Eliza and David Poe. When Edgar was a baby, David abandoned the family, leaving Eliza to support three young children. In a devastating turn, Eliza contracted tuberculosis and spent the last few months of her life in Richmond.