Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809, the second child of two traveling actors, David Poe Jr. and Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe ^[1]. The family broke apart quickly. His father abandoned the household around 1810, and his mother died of tuberculosis in Richmond, Virginia, in December 1811, before Edgar turned three ^[1]. The orphaned boy was taken in, though never legally adopted, by John Allan, a Richmond tobacco merchant, and his wife Frances. From them he took his middle name, and the household gave him a gentleman's upbringing that his later income could never sustain ^[2].

Between 1815 and 1820 the Allans lived in Britain, where the young Poe attended schools in Scotland and in the London suburb of Stoke Newington ^[1]. The boarding school atmosphere of that period later surfaced in his story William Wilson. Back in Richmond, he studied classical languages and showed early skill in verse and in swimming, once covering a long stretch of the James River against the current, an exploit he liked to recall ^[2].

In 1826 he enrolled at the newly opened University of Virginia. He did well in Latin and French, but John Allan sent him too little money to cover expenses, and Poe turned to gambling to close the gap. He left after a single year owing debts his foster father refused to pay ^[2]. The rupture between the two men, aggravated by arguments over money and over Allan's conduct, shaped much of Poe's early adulthood.

After quarreling with Allan, Poe moved to Boston, where in 1827 he paid for the printing of a slim pamphlet, Tamerlane and Other Poems, credited only to "a Bostonian" ^[3]. It sold almost nothing; surviving copies are now among the most valuable books in American collecting ^[3]. Broke, he enlisted in the United States Army under the name Edgar A. Perry, served at Fort Moultrie in South Carolina, and rose to the rank of sergeant major of artillery ^[1].

Seeking a shortcut out of enlisted service, Poe secured an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1830. Any Edgar Allan Poe biography has to reckon with what happened next: after John Allan remarried and cut him off decisively, Poe deliberately neglected duties and drills until a court martial dismissed him in 1831 ^[2]. Fellow cadets helped fund his third poetry collection, published that year in New York.

Poe then settled in Baltimore with his aunt Maria Clemm and her young daughter Virginia. He turned to fiction to earn money, and in 1833 his tale MS. Found in a Bottle won a fifty dollar prize from the Baltimore Saturday Visiter ^[1]. The contest brought him to the attention of John Pendleton Kennedy, who recommended him to the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond. Poe joined the magazine in 1835 and soon became its editor, sharpening a reputation as a fearless, often savage reviewer while the journal's circulation grew sharply under his hand ^[4].

Edgar Allan Poe achievements cluster around three fields: the short story, poetry, and criticism. In fiction he perfected the compressed tale of psychological terror. The Fall of the House of Usher and Ligeia appeared in the late 1830s, and Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, his first story collection, was published in 1840 ^[1]. Stories such as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Masque of the Red Death, and The Cask of Amontillado followed in the 1840s and remain among the most anthologized fiction in English ^[4].

With The Murders in the Rue Morgue, printed in Graham's Magazine in 1841, Poe created the detective story. His Parisian reasoner C. Auguste Dupin, who returned in The Mystery of Marie Roget and The Purloined Letter, established the template of the brilliant amateur sleuth and the admiring narrator that Arthur Conan Doyle later adapted for Sherlock Holmes ^[5]. Poe called these pieces tales of ratiocination. The Mystery Writers of America still name their annual awards the Edgars in his honor ^[5].

His poetry brought him the fame his fiction had not. The Raven, published in the New York Evening Mirror in January 1845, became a sensation almost overnight, recited, parodied, and reprinted across the country, though it earned its author only a few dollars ^[4]. Later poems, including Ulalume, The Bells, and Annabel Lee, extended his experiments in sound and refrain. As a critic and theorist he argued in essays such as The Philosophy of Composition and The Poetic Principle that a work should be built around a single calculated effect, a doctrine that shaped modern ideas of the short story ^[4]. His one novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), and his prose treatise on the universe, Eureka (1848), round out an output produced almost entirely inside the grind of magazine work ^[1].

In 1836 Poe married his cousin Virginia Clemm in Richmond. She was thirteen; he was twenty seven ^[1]. The marriage, whatever its unusual beginning, anchored his domestic life for a decade, with Maria Clemm keeping house for the pair through moves among Richmond, Philadelphia, and New York. In January 1842 Virginia burst a blood vessel while singing, the first open sign of tuberculosis, and her long decline pressed hard on Poe's nerves and finances ^[2].

Money was a constant torment. Poe was among the first Americans to attempt to live entirely by writing, and in an era without international copyright and with poorly paying magazines, he rarely escaped debt ^[4]. He edited or wrote for a string of journals, including Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, Graham's Magazine, and the Broadway Journal, which he briefly owned before it failed in 1846. His lifelong ambition to run a quality magazine of his own, to be called The Penn and later The Stylus, never came to fruition ^[1].

Poe's drinking has been argued over since his own lifetime. Contemporary accounts agree that even small amounts of alcohol affected him badly, and bouts of drinking cost him positions and friendships, though he also worked with fierce discipline for long stretches ^[2]. Virginia died at their cottage in Fordham, New York, on January 30, 1847, at twenty four, a loss from which many acquaintances felt he never fully recovered ^[1].

The two years after Virginia's death were restless. Poe lectured on poetry and on his cosmological ideas, published Eureka, and pursued several courtships, including an engagement to the poet Sarah Helen Whitman of Providence that collapsed, and a renewed attachment in 1849 to Sarah Elmira Royster Shelton, a widowed sweetheart from his Richmond youth ^[2]. That summer he spent weeks in Richmond, joined a temperance society, and appeared to friends to be planning a settled future.

On September 27, 1849, he left Richmond by boat for Baltimore, intending eventually to reach New York. What happened over the following week is unknown. On October 3, election day, he was found semi conscious and in clothes not his own outside Ryan's tavern, which served as a polling place, and was carried to Washington College Hospital ^[6]. He drifted in and out of delirium for four days, reportedly calling out the name Reynolds, and died early on October 7, 1849, at the age of forty ^[6].

No death certificate survives, and the cause listed in newspapers, congestion of the brain, was a period euphemism. Theories have ranged from alcohol and heart disease to rabies and "cooping," the practice of drugging victims and voting them repeatedly at polls ^[6]. The mystery deepened when Rufus Wilmot Griswold, a rival Poe had unwisely named literary executor, published an obituary and memoir portraying him as a depraved madman. Griswold's fabrications, including forged letters, distorted Poe's reputation for decades even as they boosted sales of his works ^[7].

Poe's afterlife in literature has been larger than his living career. In France, Charles Baudelaire translated his tales between 1852 and 1865 and treated him as a kindred spirit, and through Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé, Poe became a founding influence on the Symbolist movement and, indirectly, on modern poetry ^[4]. In the English speaking world his standing rose more slowly, but writers as different as Doyle, H. P. Lovecraft, Jules Verne, and Vladimir Nabokov worked in forms he opened. Detective fiction, science fiction, and psychological horror all carry his fingerprints ^[5].

Among basic Edgar Allan Poe facts, his geography matters: several cities claim him. The Poe Museum in Richmond, the Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum in Baltimore, a preserved home in Philadelphia run by the National Park Service, and the Poe Cottage in the Bronx each interpret a phase of his wandering life ^[8]. Baltimore's NFL team, the Ravens, took its name from his most famous poem after a public vote in 1996 ^[6]. For decades an unidentified visitor, the so called Poe Toaster, left roses and cognac at his Baltimore grave each January 19 ^[6].

Scholars continue to argue about the man behind the myth, separating Griswold's caricature from the hard working editor his colleagues knew ^[7]. What is not in dispute is the reach of the work. A writer who died with little money and a damaged name is now read in classrooms on every continent, and the tight, single effect story he theorized remains a standard by which short fiction is judged ^[4].