what is the best biography of edgar allan poe

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe was a writer and critic famous for his dark, mysterious poems and stories, including “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

• Who Was Edgar Allan Poe?

Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer, poet , critic, and editor in the 19 th century best known for his evocative short stories and poems that captured the interest of readers worldwide. His imaginative storytelling and tales of mystery and horror gave birth to the modern detective story. Many of Poe’s works, including “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Raven,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” became literary classics. Some aspects of Poe’s life, like his literature, are shrouded in mystery, and the lines between fact and fiction have been blurred substantially since his death in 1849 at age 40.

Quick Facts

Army and west point, writing career as a critic and poet, poems: “the raven” and “annabel lee”, short stories, legacy and museum.

FULL NAME: Edgar Allan Poe BORN: January 19, 1809 DIED: October 7, 1849 BIRTHPLACE: Boston, Massachusetts SPOUSE: Virginia Clemm Poe (1836-1847) ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Capricorn

Edgar Allan Poe was born Edgar Poe on January 19, 1809, in Boston. Edgar never really knew his biological parents: Elizabeth Arnold Poe, a British actor, and David Poe Jr., an actor who was born in Baltimore. His father left the family early in Edgar’s life, and his mother died from tuberculosis when he was only 2.

Separated from his brother, William, and sister, Rosalie, Poe went to live with his foster parents, John and Frances Allan, in Richmond, Virginia. John was a successful tobacco merchant there. Edgar and Frances seemed to form a bond, but he had a more difficult relationship with John.

By age 13, Poe was a prolific poet, but his literary talents were discouraged by his headmaster and by John, who preferred that young Edgar follow him in the family business. Preferring poetry over profits, Poe reportedly wrote poems on the back of some of Allan’s business papers.

Money was also an issue between Poe and John. Poe went to the University of Virginia in 1826, where he excelled in his classes. However, he didn’t receive enough money from John to cover all of his costs. Poe turned to gambling to cover the difference but ended up in debt.

He returned home only to face another personal setback—his neighbor and fiancée Sarah Elmira Royster had become engaged to someone else. Heartbroken and frustrated, Poe moved to Boston.

In 1827, around the time he published his first book, Poe joined the U.S. Army. Two years later, he learned that his mother, Frances, was dying of tuberculosis, but by the time he returned to Richmond, she had already died.

While in Virginia, Poe and his father briefly made peace with each other, and John helped Poe get an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point. Poe excelled at his studies at West Point, but he was kicked out after a year for his poor handling of his duties.

During his time at West Point, Poe had fought with John, who had remarried without telling him. Some have speculated that Poe intentionally sought to be expelled to spite his father, who eventually cut ties with Poe.

After leaving West Point, Poe published his third book and focused on writing full-time. He traveled around in search of opportunity, living in New York City, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Richmond. In 1834, John Allan died, leaving Poe out of his will, but providing for an illegitimate child Allan had never met.

Poe, who continued to struggle living in poverty, got a break when one of his short stories won a contest in the Baltimore Saturday Visiter . He began to publish more short stories and, in 1835, landed an editorial position with the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond. Poe developed a reputation as a cut-throat critic, writing vicious reviews of his contemporaries. His scathing critiques earned him the nickname the “Tomahawk Man.”

His tenure at the magazine proved short, however. Poe’s aggressive reviewing style and sometimes combative personality strained his relationship with the publication, and he left the magazine in 1837. His problems with alcohol also played a role in his departure, according to some reports.

Poe went on to brief stints at Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine , Graham’s Magazine , as well as The Broadway Journal , and he also sold his work to Alexander’s Weekly Messenger , among other journals.

In 1844, Poe moved to New York City. There, he published a news story in The New York Sun about a balloon trip across the Atlantic Ocean that he later revealed to be a hoax. His stunt grabbed attention, but it was his publication of “The Raven,” in 1845, that made Poe a literary sensation.

That same year, Poe found himself under attack for his stinging criticisms of fellow poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow . Poe claimed that Longfellow, a widely popular literary figure, was a plagiarist, which resulted in a backlash against Poe.

Despite his success and popularity as a writer, Poe continued to struggle financially, and he advocated for higher wages for writers and an international copyright law.

Poe self-published his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems , in 1827. His second poetry collection, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems , was published in 1829.

As a critic at the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond from 1835 to 1837, Poe published some of his own works in the magazine, including two parts of his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym . Later on came poems such as “Ulalume” and “The Bells.”

“The Raven”

Poe’s poem “The Raven,” published in 1845 in the New York Evening Mirror , is considered among the best-known poems in American literature and one of the best of Poe’s career. An unknown narrator laments the demise of his great love Lenore and is visited by a raven, who insistently repeats one word: “Nevermore.” In the work, which consists of 18 six-line stanzas, Poe explored some of his common themes: death and loss.

“Annabel Lee”

This lyric poem again explores Poe’s themes of death and loss and might have been written in memory of his beloved wife, Virginia, who died two years prior its publication. The poem was published on October 9, 1849, two days after Poe’s death, in the New York Tribune .

In late 1830s, Poe published Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque , a collection of short stories. It contained several of his most spine-tingling tales, including “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Ligeia,” and “William Wilson.”

In 1841, Poe launched the new genre of detective fiction with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” His literary innovations earned him the nickname “Father of the Detective Story.” A writer on the rise, he won a literary prize in 1843 for “The Gold Bug,” a suspenseful tale of secret codes and hunting treasure.

“The Black Cat”

Poe’s short story “The Black Cat” was published in 1843 in The Saturday Evening Post . In it, the narrator, a one-time animal lover, becomes an alcoholic who begins abusing his wife and black cat. By the macabre story’s end, the narrator observes his own descent into madness as he kills his wife, a crime his black cat reports to the police. The story was later included in the 1845 short story collection, Tales by Edgar Allan Poe .

Later in his career, Poe continued to work in different forms, examining his own methodology and writing in general in several essays, including “The Philosophy of Composition,” “The Poetic Principle,” and “The Rationale of Verse.” He also produced the thrilling tale, “The Cask of Amontillado.”

From 1831 to 1835, Poe lived in Baltimore, where his father was born, with his aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter Virginia. He began to devote his attention to Virginia; his cousin became his literary inspiration as well as his love interest. The couple married in 1836 when she was only 13 years old and he was 27.

In 1847, at the age of 24—the same age when Poe’s mother and brother also died—Virginia passed away from tuberculosis. Poe was overcome by grief following her death, and although he continued to work, he suffered from poor health and struggled financially until his death in 1849.

Poe died on October 7, 1849, in Baltimore at age 40.

His final days remain somewhat of a mystery. Poe left Richmond on ten days earlier, on September 27, and was supposedly on his way to Philadelphia. On October 3, he was found in Baltimore in great distress. Poe was taken to Washington College Hospital, where he died four days later. His last words were “Lord, help my poor soul.”

At the time, it was said that Poe died of “congestion of the brain.” But his actual cause of death has been the subject of endless speculation. Some experts believe that alcoholism led to his demise while others offer up alternative theories. Rabies, epilepsy, and carbon monoxide poisoning are just some of the conditions thought to have led to the great writer’s death.

Shortly after his passing, Poe’s reputation was badly damaged by his literary adversary Rufus Griswold. Griswold, who had been sharply criticized by Poe, took his revenge in his obituary of Poe, portraying the gifted yet troubled writer as a mentally deranged drunkard and womanizer. He also penned the first biography of Poe, which helped cement some of these misconceptions in the public’s minds.

Although Poe never had financial success in his lifetime, he has become one of America’s most enduring writers. His works are as compelling today as they were more than a century ago. An innovative and imaginative thinker, Poe crafted stories and poems that still shock, surprise, and move modern readers. His dark work influenced writers including Charles Baudelaire , Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Stephane Mallarme.

The Baltimore home where Poe stayed from 1831 to 1835 with his aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter, Poe’s cousin and future wife Virginia, is now a museum. The Edgar Allan Poe House offers a self-guided tour featuring exhibits on Poe’s foster parents, his life and death in Baltimore, and the poems and short stories he wrote while living there, as well as memorabilia including his chair and desk.

• The death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.
• Lord, help my poor soul.
• Sound loves to revel near a summer night.
• But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.
• They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
• The boundaries which divide life from death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?
• With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence; they must not—they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind.
• And now—have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the senses?—now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well, too. It was the beating of the old man’s heart.
• All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
• I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active—not more happy—nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.
• [I]f you wish to forget anything upon the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.
• Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.

Watch “The Mystery of Edgar Allan Poe” on HISTORY Vault

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Edgar Allan Poe

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

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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Poet Biographies

The Mysterious Life of Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe was a 19th-century master of vivid imagery and impeccable craftsmanship. His short stories and poems are renowned for their dark, eerie themes. His peculiar demise at a young age rounded off a life of mystery.

Edgar Allan Poe’s work as a poet, short-story writer, and editor was notable in his contribution to world literature. Poe was a pioneer of mysterious, thrilling writing that left its mark on American poetry and literature forever. He is considered one of the originators of detective fiction and true  gothic   horror .

He was also one of the first American writers to gain an international reputation. His overall body of work, such as; poetry, short stories , tales of horror, and even critical theories, has garnered him a major figure in the history of literature.

About Edgar Allan Poe

• 1 Life Facts
• 2 Interesting Facts
• 3 Famous Poems
• 4 Early Life
• 5 Literary Career
• 6 Writing Career and Relationships
• 8 Influence from other Poets
• Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 19, 1809.
• Poe enlisted in the US Army at eighteen years old.
• Poe is credited with the invention of the detective genre of fiction.
• ‘ Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque ‘ was published in 1839.
• Virginia, Poe’s young wife, died in 1847 from tuberculosis, and Edgar Allan Poe died two years later.

Interesting Facts

• He struggled with gambling debts.
• Poe married his thirteen-year-old cousin Virginia.
• He might’ve been named after a Shakespearean character in “King Lear.”
• ‘ The Raven ‘ was published in 1845.
• His death has remained a mystery, inspiring many to speculate on the cause.

Famous Poems

• ‘The Raven’   is one of the scariest poems that Poe wrote. It has since become his most famous and commonly studied. The phrase “Quoth the raven Nevermore” has been included in everything from Halloween decorations to horror movies/tv shows. The poem takes the reader into the mind of a questionable narrator who is experiencing what seems to be a mental break.
• ‘ Anabel Lee’   is a gorgeous short poem that depicts, as many of Poe’s poems did, the death of a woman. Poe’s life was filled with tragedy , particularly around the women he loved. The poem describes the love the speaker had for a young woman who has since been taken away by the angels. Their jealousy got the best of them, and they brought her to Heaven.
• ‘Alone’   is another haunting poem that was inspired by the death of a woman in Poe’s life, this time his foster mother, Frances. In it, the speaker looks at his childhood and tries to understand his loneliness. The entire poem is quite dark and carries a depressing and downtrodden tone throughout.
• ‘The Haunted Palace’ originally appeared in Poe’s short story , The Fall of the House of Usher.  The poem describes, through the metaphor of an old house, the collapse of a person’s mind. This person, who is represented by the house, is slowly but steadily going insane.
• ‘Lenore ,’ which is also sometimes known as ‘A Pæan,’ is once more a description of the emotional results of a young woman’s death. In the poem, the speaker changes perspectives , alternating between different perspectives on Lenore and what everyone should do in regard to her death now.

Explore more Edgar Allan Poe poems here.

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 19, 1809. He was the second child of English actress Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins and his father, David Poe Jr, who was also an actor. It is often speculated that Poe was named in accordance with the Shakespearean play in which his parents were performing at the time of his birth. His family was both Irish and English by descent and came to America around 1750. He had two siblings, an older brother, William, and a young sister, Rosalie.

Poe’s father left his family in 1810, and unfortunately for the young children, their mother died a year later from tuberculosis, or consumption as it was commonly known. Poe was not yet three years old. From that point on, Poe was raised by a Scotsman named John Allan in Richmond, Virginia. It was from this family that Poe took on his middle name, “Allan.” For a short time, when Poe was still quite young, the family took a trip to Scotland. He studied at a grammar school in Irvine and later at a boarding school in Chelsea, England.

After a temporary stay in Great Britain, the family moved back to Richmond in 1820, and in 1826 Poe registered at the University of Virginia. It was his intention to study ancient and modern languages. Poe’s time at the university was turbulent, and due to increasing gambling debts, he lost touch with his foster father. He left university after only one year and traveled to Boston, where he worked as a newspaper writer and clerk. Poe’s funds and career prospects were quite limited, so in an effort to improve his circumstances, he enlisted in the US Army at eighteen years old.

Literary Career

He served at Fort Independence in Boston at the same time that he was releasing his first volume of poetry titled ‘ Tamerlane and Other Poems .’ The book had very limited printing and received little to no attention. After two years in the army, Poe sought and was given a discharge, after which he moved back to Baltimore, where he stayed with his aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter Virginia Eliza Clemm. He was also publishing his second collection, this time, ‘ Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane , and Minor Poems,’  which was released in 1829.

Due to the circumstances of his military discharge, he was made to attend the United States Military Academy at West Point. His time there was also brief, during which he sought out a court-martial for neglect of duty. He then moved on to New York City. The following years saw the release of his third volume of poetry and the death of his brother. In the mid-thirties, after meeting with no poetic success, Poe turned to  prose . He won a prize for his work in 1833, bringing him a small amount of attention.

In 1835, Poe became the assistant editor of the  Southern Literary Messenger,  was fired for drunkenness, and married his thirteen-year-old cousin Virginia the next year. At their wedding ceremony, the couple was forced to lie about Virginia’s age, stating she was 21 instead of 13. In 1839, he was appointed coeditor for  Burton’s Gentlemen’s Magazine  in Philadelphia. Poe then regained his previous job and published a number of poems, stories, and reviews. It was during this time that he wrote some of his best-known stories such as, “ The Fall of the House of Usher ,” and “ The Murders in the Rue Morgue ,” which is considered to be the inception of the modern detective story . These works were part of the collection ‘ Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque’  published in 1839.

Writing Career and Relationships

Three years later, Poe’s temporary good fortune took a turn for the worse. Virginia began to show signs of consumption, symptoms Poe knew well. His drinking became worse during this time period, and he left his job. He worked for a couple of other journals, and his most popular poem, ‘ The Raven ,’ was published in 1845.

Poe’s wife died in 1847 from tuberculosis, causing a deepening of his depression and further worsening his alcoholism. After her death, he attempted to enter into a permanent relationship with another poet. The couple became engaged, only to split up, driven apart by Poe’s habits.

In 1849, Poe released a lecture called ‘ Eureka ,’ which has been met with mixed reviews to this day. Some scholars and critics viewed the work that explained the universe as a piece of genius, while others considered it nonsensical.

Edgar Allan Poe’s death is still somewhat mysterious. He left Richmond for Baltimore in September 1849. On October 3, 1849, he was found wandering around Baltimore in a semi-conscious state. He was taken to the hospital very early in the morning but was never conscious long enough to explain his condition. It is said that he was wearing someone else’s clothes during the whole ordeal and called out for someone named “Reynolds.” He died four days later of what was then called “acute congestion of the brain.” It is now thought that he had perhaps suffered from rabies, syphilis, cholera, or perhaps heart disease.

Influence from other Poets

Edgar Allan Poe was notably influenced by writers such as  Lord Byron ,  John Keats ,  Percy Bysshe Shelley . He has served as an inspiration for countless others since his death. It is said that the poems of Edgar Allan Poe heavily influenced the French Symbolist movement of the late 19th century.

Edgar Allan Poe has been attributed to many iconic quotes. However, one that stands out is his view on language when he says that “Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.”

Edgar Allan Poe was lauded for his wide range of talents, from short story writing to essays on critical theory. However, his poetry was iconic. His most famous work is ‘ The Raven ,’ a poem about the narrator ’s descent into madness.

Like with any creative person, their life filters through into their work. This was no different for Edgar Allan Poe. After the death of both his parents at a young age and then witnessing the death of his foster mother, it is clear to see the correlation between Poe’s fascination with the macabre and his own life circumstances.

Alongside being a pioneer in his poetic field, Edgar Allan Poe was responsible for creating a number of new words that had not been seen in print before. It is believed that he had a hand in the birth of around 1200 words.

Although we can never know a poet’s true inspiration, it can be argued that Edgar Allan Poe’s life experiences shaped his poetic style . He had suffered many losses throughout his life and had been surrounded by death at every stage. As life imitates art, it is safe to assume that these morbid experiences had an impact on Poe’s work.

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Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)

Edgar Allan Poe was a poet, short story writer, editor, and critic. Credited by many scholars as the inventor of the detective genre in fiction, he was a master at using elements of mystery, psychological terror, and the macabre in his writing. His most famous poem, “The Raven” (1845), combines his penchant for suspense with some of the most famous lines in American poetry. While editor of the Richmond-based Southern Literary Messenger , Poe carved out a philosophy of poetry that emphasized brevity and beauty for its own sake. Stories, he wrote, should be crafted to convey a single, unified impression, and for Poe, that impression was most often dread. “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), for instance, memorably describes the paranoia of its narrator, who is guilty of murder. After leaving Richmond, Poe lived and worked in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and New York, seeming to collect literary enemies wherever he went. Incensed by his especially sharp, often sarcastic style of criticism, they were not inclined to help Poe as his life unraveled because of sickness and poverty. After Poe’s death at the age of forty, a former colleague, Rufus W. Griswold, wrote a scathing biography that contributed, in the years to come, to a literary caricature. Poe’s poetry and prose, however, have endured.

Early Years

Edgar Poe was born on January 19, 1809, in Boston, to traveling actors David Poe Jr. (a Baltimore, Maryland, native) and Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins (an emigrant from England). Poe was the couple’s second of three children. His brother, William Henry Leonard Poe, was born in 1807, and his sister, Rosalie Poe, was born in 1810. On December 8, 1811, when Poe was just two years old, his mother died in Richmond. His father, who had left the family in 1810, died of unknown circumstances. Henry, as William Henry Leonard was known, lived with his grandparents in Baltimore, while Rosalie and Edgar remained in Richmond. William and Jane Mackenzie adopted Rosalie, and Edgar became the foster son of John and Frances Allan. Poe received his middle name from his foster parents.

In 1815 Allan, a tobacco merchant, moved with his wife and foster son to England in an attempt to improve his business interests there. Poe attended school in Chelsea until 1820, when the family returned to Richmond. John Allan had always hoped that Poe would join his own mercantile firm, but Poe was determined to become a writer and, in particular, a poet. In 1826, he attended the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Although he distinguished himself academically, Allan denied him financial support after less than a year because of Poe’s gambling debts and what Allan perceived to be his ward’s lack of direction. Without money, Poe returned briefly to Richmond, only to find that his fiancée, Sarah Elmira Royster, under the direction of her family, had married an older and wealthier suitor, Alexander Shelton.

Disheartened and penniless, Poe left Richmond for Boston where, using the name “A Bostonian,” he authored Tamerlane and other Poems (1827), a collection of seven brief, lyrical poems. In particular, “The Lake” employs what would become typical Poe-esque symbolism, with calm waters representing the speaker’s repressed emotions, always threatening to dangerously swell. The book’s sales were negligible.

Still unable to support himself, Poe enlisted in the United States Army on May 26, 1827, under the pseudonym “Edgar A. Perry.” (He was eighteen at the time but claimed to be twenty-two.) During his military service, he was stationed at Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island in Charleston, South Carolina—a site he would later appropriate as the setting for his story, “The Gold Bug”—and then at Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia. On February 28, 1829, while Poe was in Virginia, his foster mother, Frances Allan, died.

Despite having been promoted to sergeant major, Poe became dissatisfied with army life and appealed to his foster father for help in releasing him from his five-year commitment. In a December 1, 1828, letter to Allan, Poe worried that “the prime of my life would be wasted” in the army and threatened “more decided measures if you refuse to assist me.” During this tumultuous period, Poe compiled a second collection of verse, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems (1829), but it, too, received little attention. Critics described the poems in terms ranging from “incoherent” to “beautiful and enduring.”

With Allan’s help, Poe left the army and was admitted to the United States Military Academy at West Point, which he attended from 1830 until 1831. Poe thrived academically, but again experienced financial problems, this time running afoul of both his foster father and school officials. Expelled from West Point and disowned by Allan, Poe traveled to Baltimore to reside with his aunt, Maria Clemm, and her young daughter, Virginia. The events of Poe’s life from 1831 until 1833 remain relatively obscure.

Out of Obscurity

While living in Baltimore, Poe turned in earnest to his literary efforts. His third volume of verse, Poems (1831), hints at the Gothic sensibility—in particular, a preoccupation with death and psychological instability—that would become his trademark. For instance, “Irene” (revised as “The Sleeper”) features a distraught young man who, at midnight, mourns over his lover’s corpse: “Strange is thy pallor! strange thy dress, / Strange above all, thy length of tress, / And this all solemn silentness!” Poe received some help and encouragement from the literary editor and critic John Neal, but his poems continued to attract scant notice.

In an effort to improve his financial position, Poe turned to fiction. Because they sold the best, he wrote mostly Gothic-style horror and suspense stories and, in 1831, entered five of them in a contest sponsored by the weekly newspaper, the Philadelphia Saturday Courier . Although he won no prize, the tales were published anonymously during 1832. In October 1833, Poe’s story “MS. Found in a Bottle”—about a midnight accident at sea and a mysterious ship that appears out of the “watery hell”—won a competition sponsored by the Baltimore Saturday Visiter . His poem “The Coliseum” would have been awarded best poem, as well, but the judges preferred not to offer both prizes to a single author.

One of the competition’s judges was John Pendleton Kennedy, a Whig Party politician, literary editor, and author of Swallow Barn, or a Sojourn in the Old Dominion (1832). In 1835, Kennedy encouraged Poe to apply for an assistant editor position at the Southern Literary Messenger , a Richmond-based magazine founded the previous year by Thomas Willis White. Poe received the job and was soon promoted to editor despite clashing with White over his—Poe’s—excessive drinking.

In May 1836, for the first time feeling financially secure enough to marry, Poe wed his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm. Historians disagree over whether they consummated their marriage. Virginia’s mother, Poe’s aunt, kept house for the couple and continued to do so for Poe after Virginia’s death.

Poe’s work at the Messenger helped him climb out of literary obscurity. Under his direction, the journal’s circulation increased and Poe began to develop contacts with the northern literary establishment. He turned these successes to his advantage, publishing revised versions of his own stories and poems. Still, he became best known for his caustic literary criticism, such as a December 1835 review of Theodore S. Fay’s novel, Norman Leslie : “We do not mean to say that there is positively nothing in Mr. Fay’s novel to commend—but there is indeed very little.” And about Morris Mattson’s Paul Ulric , he wrote, in February 1836: “When we called Norman Leslie the silliest book in the world we had certainly never seen Paul Ulric .”

That Fay was a darling of the New York literary establishment helped provoke a long-running feud between Poe and Lewis Gaylord Clark, editor of New York City’s Knickerbocker Magazine and an ardent defender of northern literary sensibilities. Poe and Clark insulted one another in print for years, with Clark, in 1845, calling Poe “‘nothing if not critical,’ and even less than nothing at that.”

A New Literary Sensibility

Poe’s sharp-tongued criticisms may have won him lifelong enemies, but they also served to articulate an important new literary sensibility. Poems should be short, he argued, and poems should be beautiful. In his “Letter to Mr. B—,” published in the Messenger (July 1836), Poe mocks William Wordsworth for his “long wordy discussions by which he tries to reason us into admiration of his poetry,” and then, after quoting the poet on the subject of a “snow-white mountain lamb,” sarcastically rejoinders: “Now, we have no doubt this is all true: we will believe it, indeed we will, Mr. W. Is it sympathy for the sheep you wish to excite? I love a sheep from the bottom of my heart.”

True literature, meanwhile, should celebrate beauty for its own sake and not be burdened with the sort of purposefulness one might find in a Sunday morning sermon. Here, Poe both echoes Nathaniel Hawthorne—who famously complained of those inclined “relentlessly to impale the story with its moral, as with an iron rod”—and pokes fun at his Puritan sensibilities: “I see no reason, then, why our metaphysical poets should plume themselves so much on the utility of their works, unless indeed they refer to instruction with eternity in view; in which case, sincere respect for their piety would not allow me to express contempt for their judgment … ”

“The Tell-Tale Heart” Over the years, Poe also argued that the short story was the supreme form in fiction, meant to be tightly constructed and convey a single, unified impression. In Poe’s case, that impression was most often fear, foreboding, and dread, as evidenced in short stories like “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846), which describes an excruciatingly slow plan of revenge. And for such unified impressions to take hold, brevity—a term Poe calculated to mean a work that took no longer than ninety minutes to read—was crucial. “As the novel cannot be read at one sitting,” he wrote in 1842 in an admiring review of a Hawthorne collection, “it cannot avail itself of the immense benefit of totality . Worldly interests, intervening during the pauses of perusals, modify, counteract and annul the impressions intended.”

Poe did not limit his fiction to Gothic tales, however. From 1833 until 1836, he attempted and failed to find a publisher for his collection of satirical stories, Tales of the Folio Club . In the book, club members meet monthly to critique each other’s stories, all of which turn out to be caricatures of the styles of popular writers from Poe’s day. His critical ax never dull, Poe still managed to place a number of the stories in journals such as the Messenger and the Philadelphia Saturday Courier .

After Richmond

After years of battling the northern literary elite, Poe left the Messenger in January 1837 and moved north himself, working in various editorial posts, most notably at Graham’s Magazine in Philadelphia. Sometime between November 1839 and January 1840, his two-volume collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque was published, providing a broader audience to many of his previously published stories. In stories such as “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Poe rebutted charges of “Germanism and gloom,” Germany being a preferred literary source for his Gothic sensibility. “If in many of my productions terror has been the thesis,” he wrote, “I maintain that terror is not of Germany but of the soul—”

His famous opening to “Usher” suggests that he more than walked the walk of his literary philosophy, expertly compressing Teutonic gloom into a single storm cloud of a sentence: “During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.”

Graham’s , meanwhile, featured some of Poe’s most assertive original fiction. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (April 1841), for instance, Poe introduced the detective story prototype that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would make so famous with his Sherlock Holmes episodes: an uncannily observant detective solves the crime while accompanied by his friend, who also narrates the events. In “The Masque of the Red Death” (May 1842), Poe traded the hyper-logic of detectives for the psychological horror of disease and inevitable death, describing a masquerade ball set in a plague-stricken Italian castle.

Later Years

By 1844, Poe had relocated to New York, home of any number of his most bitter literary enemies and where he became the editor and then owner of the literary weekly, Broadway Journal . In January 1845, the New York Evening Mirror published his poem, “The Raven,” a disturbing account of its grief-stricken narrator’s encounter with a bird that knows but one word: “Nevermore.” The poem’s opening lines— “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary / Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,”—are among the most famous in the English language and brought Poe wide and almost instant acclaim. Nevertheless, they failed to deliver him from his persistent financial troubles.

Nor did Poe’s unpredictable moods and pugilistic criticism help him make friends in literary circles. In October 1845, he annoyed a Boston audience prepared for a talk about poetry by instead reciting his long and obscure poem “Al Aaraaf.” He continued to lampoon in print his fellow writers, including Thomas Dunn English, whom he worked with in Philadelphia. Some critics have even suggested that Poe used his feud with English as motivation for his revenge fantasy in “The Cask of Amontillado.”

When Broadway Journal went under in January 1846, Poe lost the most reliable venue for his attacks. And having alienated so many of his fellow writers and editors, he found it difficult to publish and, therefore, to make money. Then, in January 1847, his wife Virginia died of tuberculosis, sending Poe into bouts of depression and torturous grief, during which he reportedly sought the comforts of alcohol. Some historians have speculated that his alcohol use was complicated by either diabetes or hypoglycemia, which would have resulted in violent mood swings. This, in turn, might help to explain later portraits of Poe—in particular from the pen of Rufus W. Griswold, who had succeeded him as editor at Graham’s —as an irreclaimable alcoholic.

In 1849, Poe traveled to Richmond to read his poetry and lecture on “The Philosophy of Composition,” which had been published in the April 1846 issue of Graham’s as a critical explication of his writing of “The Raven.” While there, he reunited with his one-time fiancée, Elmira Shelton, who was now widowed and wealthy. Poe decided to marry her and move to Richmond, and late in September departed for Fordham, New York, where he would arrange to move his aunt Maria to Virginia.

Edgar Allan Poe (Audio) The move never happened, however. A few weeks later, Poe was found unconscious and dangerously ill outside a Baltimore tavern. He died in the hospital on October 7, 1849, and received a swift burial in his grandfather Poe’s cemetery lot in the Westminster Presbyterian Church Cemetery in Baltimore. Historians have long disagreed about the exact cause of his death, suggesting everything from rabies to alcoholism.

Poe had given Griswold a memorandum from which to write a biography of him, but the editor’s use of this work was distinctly unflattering—even treacherous. Griswold quickly produced a polemic obituary and soon after undertook to publish a multivolume edition of Poe’s writings, The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe (1850–1856) , as well as an unjust and inflammatory fifty-page memoir detailing Poe’s life. This sketch, subsequently used by many later biographers, helped in part to create the caricature of Poe that has survived in American literary legend—as a death-obsessed, drug-addled debaucher.

Poe’s room on the West Range at the University of Virginia is open for viewing by the public. In Richmond, the Poe Museum, which first opened in 1922, features a large collection of the writer’s manuscripts, letters, first editions, and personal belongings.

Major Works

• Tamerlane and Other Poems: By a Bostonian (1827)
• Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829)
• Poems, By Edgar A. Poe (1831)
• The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, of Nantucket (short novel, 1838)
• Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840)
• Prose Romances: The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Man That Was Used Up (1843)
• The Raven and Other Poems (1845)
• Tales (1845)
• Eureka: A Prose Poem (1848)
• The Literati (1850)
• Politan: An Unfinished Tragedy (1923)

The Poe Museum

The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore

University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center

The Poe Studies Association

• Antebellum Period (1820–1860)
• Fisher, Benjamin F. Ed. Poe and His Times: The Artist in His Milieu. Baltimore: The Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1990.
• Hayes, Kevin J., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
• Quinn, Arthur Hobson. Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography . New York: Appleton-Century, 1941; reprinted with a new foreword by Shawn Rosenheim. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
• Thomas, Dwight, and David K. Jackson. The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe 1809–1849 . Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987.
• Wagenknecht, Edward. Edgar Allan Poe: The Man Behind the Legend. New York: Oxford University Press, 1963.
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Halloween at the Poe Grave

October 31, 2019 6:00 pm - 9:00 pm

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October 31, 2018 6:00 pm - 9:00 pm

Poe Birthday Celebration

Birthday Celebration at Westminster Hall

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January 19, 2019

George Peabody Library

Poe Exhibit

October 4, 2016 - February 5, 2017

Online exhibit of selected items

102nd Annual Commemorative Program

“Gothic Mycology and Posthuman Ethics in Poe's ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ ”

October 6, 2024 12:30 pm

Baltimore Poe House and Museum

International Poe Festival

Two days of books, music and art, commemorating the 174th anniversary of the death of Edgar Allan Poe

October 7 & 8, 2023

October 31, 2023 6:00 pm - 9:00 pm

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.)
• Subject Index   (to pages at this site) (in preparation)
• 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
• The Poe Society of Baltimore Website
• 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

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

“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) .

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

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

Last update.....: August 9, 2024

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Although substantially complete, various parts of this site are still under construction, and new material is constantly being added. Providing comprehensive and reliable information takes time, so please bear with us. (Proofreading pages, particularly historical items, requires considerable effort, and is likely to be a perpetual task.) We are currently in the process of giving the site a major rennovation to adopt XHTML (1.0 strict) and CSS. As part of these changes, we will continue to replace the white background with a colored one (to reduce the harsh appearance and improve readability on the screen) and add boxes to give pages a sense of visual continuity. (The box style of the heading changes somewhat to reflect the rank of that page in the overall hierarchy. The four main section division pages resemble the box at the top of the current page, and feature the image of Poe with his signature. Pages within each of these divisions have a slightly different style of box, and carry a navigation line at the top. The current page, referred to in navigation bars within this site as “Main Menu,” is technically the “Home” page.) Although these standards continue to evolve, it is presumed that sufficient time has passed so that they are supported in most browsers. Generally, revised pages will appear with a beige frame against a dark green background. These changes are part of an ongoing process and must be accomplished page by page. There are inevitably formatting quirks between various browsers, and although every reasonable effort has been made to support all major browsers, our pages are chiefly adapted to Firefox.

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

Edgar Allan Poe | Biography, Facts, Poems & Quotations

Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849) was a 19th century American writer, editor and literary critic who is regarded as one of the greatest poets and short story writers of his era . Poe was a controversial figure during his time due to his being a ruthless literary critic who wrote caustic reviews of literary works of other writers. On January 29, 1845, Poe’s poem The Raven appeared in the New York Evening Mirror . It became an immediate popular sensation making Edgar Allan Poe a household name . The poetry of Poe is famous for its dark romanticism , a literary sub-genre of romanticism , reflecting fascination with the irrational, the demonic and the grotesque. Apart from poetry, Poe was one of the earliest practitioners of the short story and he is credited with creating the first recorded detective in the literary world. Know all about Edgar Allan Poe including his biography, interesting facts about him, his most famous poems and his best quotes.

After his father abandoned the family and his mother died, Poe was raised by his foster parents, John Allan and his wife Frances Allan . Though Poe wanted to become a writer from an early age, circumstances forced him to join the army at the age of 18. It was only in the early 1830s that Poe was able to dedicate his time to a full time writing career. He went on to work for a number of newspapers including Southern Literary Messenger, Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, Graham’s Magazine and Broadway Journal . Poe struggled financially throughout his life . Moreover, his life was marred by tragedies including the death of his wife Maria Clemm in 1847 . Poe died two years later under mysterious circumstances . Know about the family, education, career, marriage and death of Edgar Allan Poe through his biography.

INTERESTING FACTS

Edgar Allan Poe remains a towering figure in world literature due to his many contributions. He was controversial during his time due to his being a ruthless literary critic who wrote caustic reviews of literary works of other writers. Poe was able to achieve nationwide renown due to his poem The Raven but, despite being well known, he struggled financially throughout his life . There are many interesting facts related to Poe including his knack for cryptography ; his publishing a hoax article ; a mysterious man visiting his grave every January 19 th ; and a writer claiming that his ghost helped her in composing her poems . Know more about Edgar Allan Poe through these 10 interesting facts.

FAMOUS POEMS

Romanticism was a 19th century literary movement that laid emphasis on emotion and individualism as well as glorification of the past and of nature . The poetry of Poe is famous for its dark romanticism , a literary sub-genre of romanticism , reflecting fascination with the irrational, the demonic and the grotesque. The favorite theme of Poe was the death of a beautiful woman which he called “the most poetical topic in the world” . His poems appear throughout popular culture and lines from them are often quoted. Here are the 10 most famous poems by Edgar Allan Poe including The Raven, Eldorado, The Bells and Annabel Lee .

1. “I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”

2. “ Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”

3. “ Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.”

4. “ Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.”

5. “ To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a little man can himself attain greatness.”

6. “ I need scarcely observe that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement.”

7. “ The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.”

8. “ All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”

9. “ We loved with a love that was more than love.”

10. “ Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before. “

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• World Biography

Edgar Allan Poe Biography

Born: January 19, 1809 Boston, Massachusetts Died: October 7, 1849 Baltimore, Maryland American poet and writer

One of America's major writers, Edgar Allan Poe was far ahead of his time in his vision of a special area of human experience—the "inner world" of dreams and the imagination. He wrote fiction, poetry, and criticism and also worked as a magazine editor.

Orphaned at three

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 19, 1809, the son of David Poe Jr. and Elizabeth Arnold Poe, both professional actors. By the time he was three, Edgar, his older brother, and his younger sister were orphans; their father deserted the family, and then their mother died. The children were each sent to different families to live. Edgar went to the Richmond, Virginia, home of John and Frances Allan, whose name Poe was to take later as his own middle name. The Allans were wealthy, and though they never adopted Poe, they treated him like a son, made sure he was educated in private academies, and took him to England for a five-year stay. Mrs. Allan, at least, showed considerable affection toward him.

As Edgar entered his teenage years, however, bad feelings developed between him and John Allan. Allan disapproved of Edgar's ambition to become a writer, thought he was ungrateful, and seems to have decided to cut Poe out of his will. When, in 1826, Poe entered the newly opened University of Virginia, he had so little money that he turned to gambling in an attempt to make money. In eight months he lost two thousand dollars. Allan's refusal to help him led to a final break between the two, and in March 1827 Poe went out on his own.

Enlists in the army

Poe then signed up for a five-year term in the U.S. Army. In 1827 his Tamerlane and Other Poems was published at his own expense, but the book failed to attract notice. By January 1829, serving under the name of Edgar A. Perry, Poe rose to the rank of sergeant major. He did not want to serve out the full five years, however, and he arranged to be discharged from the army on the condition that he would seek an appointment at West Point Academy. He thought such a move might please John Allan. That same year Al Araaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems was published in Baltimore, Maryland, and it received a highly favorable notice from the novelist and critic John Neal.

Poe visited Allan in Richmond, but he left in May 1830 after he and Allan had another violent quarrel. The West Point appointment came through the next month, but, since Poe no longer had any use for it, he did not last long. Lacking Allan's permission to resign, Poe sought and received a dismissal for "gross neglect of duty" and "disobedience of orders." Poe realized that he would never receive financial help from Allan.

Marriage and editing jobs

The panic increased after 1837. Poe moved with Virginia and her mother to New York City, where he managed to publish The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), his only long work of fiction. The family then moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where Poe served as coeditor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine. In two years he boosted its circulation from five thousand to twenty thousand and contributed some of his best fiction to its pages, including "The Fall of the House of Usher." In 1840 he published Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. But there was trouble at Burton's, and in 1841 Poe left to work as the editor of Graham's Magazine. It was becoming clear that two years was about as long as Poe could hold a job, and though he contributed quality fiction and criticism to the magazine, his drinking, his feuding with other writers, and his inability to get along with people caused him to leave after 1842.

Illness and crisis

"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Man That Was Used Up" emerged in 1843, and a Philadelphia newspaper offered a one-hundred-dollar prize for his story "The Gold Bug," but Poe's problems were increasing. His wife, who had been a vital source of comfort and support to him, began showing signs of the consumption (or tuberculosis, an infection of the lungs) that would eventually kill her. When his troubles became too great, Poe tried to relieve them by drinking, which made him ill. Things seemed to improve slightly in 1844; the publication of the poem "The Raven" brought him some fame, and this success was followed in 1845 by the publication of two volumes, The Raven and Other Poems and Tales. But his wife's health continued to worsen, and he was still not earning enough money to support her and Clemm.

Poe's next job was with Godey's Lady's Book, but he was unable to keep steady employment, and things got so bad that he and his family almost starved in the winter of 1846. Then, on January 30, 1847, Virginia Poe died. Somehow Poe continued to produce work of very high caliber. In 1848 he published the ambitious Eureka, and he returned to Richmond in 1849 to court a now-widowed friend of his youth, Mrs. Shelton. They were to be married, and Poe left for New York City at the end of September to bring Clemm back for the wedding. On the way he stopped off in Baltimore, Maryland. No one knows exactly what happened, but he was found unconscious on October 3, 1849, near a saloon that had been used as a polling place. He died in a hospital four days later.

It is not hard to see the connection between the nightmare of Poe's life and his work. His fictional work resembles the dreams of a troubled individual who keeps coming back, night after night, to the same pattern of dream. At times he traces out the pattern lightly, at other times in a "thoughtful" mood, but often the tone is terror. He finds himself descending, into a cellar, a wine vault, or a whirlpool, always falling. The women he meets either change form into someone else or are whisked away completely. And at last he drops off, into a pit or a river or a walled-up tomb.

For More Information

Bittner, William R. Poe: A Biography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1962.

Meyers, Jeffrey. Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1992.

Quinn, Arthur H. Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography. New York: Appleton-Century, 1941. Reprint, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Walsh, John Evangelist. Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998.

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Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe

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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 of letters.

The outstanding fact in Poe’s character is a strange duality. The wide divergence of contemporary judgments on the man seems almost to point to the coexistence of two persons in him. With those he loved he was gentle and devoted. Others, who were the butt of his sharp criticism , found him irritable and self-centred and went so far as to accuse him of lack of principle. Was it, it has been asked, a double of the man rising from harrowing nightmares or from the haggard inner vision of dark crimes or from appalling graveyard fantasies that loomed in Poe’s unstable being?

Much of Poe’s best work is concerned with terror and sadness, but in ordinary circumstances the poet was a pleasant companion. He talked brilliantly, chiefly of literature, and read his own poetry and that of others in a voice of surpassing beauty. He admired Shakespeare and Alexander Pope . He had a sense of humour, apologizing to a visitor for not keeping a pet raven. If the mind of Poe is considered, the duality is still more striking. On one side, he was an idealist and a visionary. His yearning for the ideal was both of the heart and of the imagination. His sensitivity to the beauty and sweetness of women inspired his most touching lyrics (“ To Helen ,” “Annabel Lee,” “Eulalie,” “ To One in Paradise”) and the full-toned prose hymns to beauty and love in “Ligeia” and “ Eleonora.” In “Israfel” his imagination carried him away from the material world into a dreamland. This Pythian mood was especially characteristic of the later years of his life.

More generally, in such verses as “ The Valley of Unrest,” “ Lenore,” “The Raven,” “For Annie,” and “Ulalume” and in his prose tales, his familiar mode of evasion from the universe of common experience was through eerie thoughts, impulses, or fears. From these materials he drew the startling effects of his tales of death (“The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” “The Premature Burial,” “The Oval Portrait,” “Shadow”), his tales of wickedness and crime (“Berenice,” “The Black Cat,” “William Wilson,” “The Imp of the Perverse,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Tell-Tale Heart” ), his tales of survival after dissolution (“ Ligeia,” “ Morella,” “ Metzengerstein”), and his tales of fatality (“ The Assignation,” “ The Man of the Crowd”). Even when he does not hurl his characters into the clutch of mysterious forces or onto the untrodden paths of the beyond, he uses the anguish of imminent death as the means of causing the nerves to quiver ( “The Pit and the Pendulum” ), and his grotesque invention deals with corpses and decay in an uncanny play with the aftermath of death.

On the other side, Poe is conspicuous for a close observation of minute details, as in the long narratives and in many of the descriptions that introduce the tales or constitute their settings. Closely connected with this is his power of ratiocination. He prided himself on his logic and carefully handled this real accomplishment so as to impress the public with his possessing still more of it than he had; hence the would-be feats of thought reading, problem unraveling, and cryptography that he attributed to his characters William Legrand and C. Auguste Dupin . This suggested to him the analytical tales, which created the detective story , and his science fiction tales.

The same duality is evinced in his art. He was capable of writing angelic or weird poetry, with a supreme sense of rhythm and word appeal, or prose of sumptuous beauty and suggestiveness, with the apparent abandon of compelling inspiration; yet he would write down a problem of morbid psychology or the outlines of an unrelenting plot in a hard and dry style. In Poe’s masterpieces the double contents of his temper, of his mind, and of his art are fused into a oneness of tone, structure, and movement, the more effective, perhaps, as it is compounded of various elements.

As a critic, Poe laid great stress upon correctness of language, metre, and structure. He formulated rules for the short story , in which he sought the ancient unities : i.e., the short story should relate a complete action and take place within one day in one place. To these unities he added that of mood or effect. He was not extreme in these views, however. He praised longer works and sometimes thought allegories and morals admirable if not crudely presented. Poe admired originality, often in work very different from his own, and was sometimes an unexpectedly generous critic of decidedly minor writers.

Poe’s genius was early recognized abroad. No one did more to persuade the world and, in the long run, the United States , of Poe’s greatness than the French poets Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé . Indeed his role in French literature was that of a poetic master model and guide to criticism. French Symbolism relied on his “The Philosophy of Composition,” borrowed from his imagery, and used his examples to generate the theory of pure poetry .

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Ranking The 10 Best Edgar Allan Poe Stories

Grace Lapointe

Grace Lapointe’s fiction has been published in Kaleidoscope, Deaf Poets Society, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, and is forthcoming in Corporeal Lit Mag. Her essays and poetry have been published in Wordgathering. Her stories and essays—including ones that she wrote as a college student—have been taught in college courses and cited in books and dissertations. More of her work is at https://gracelapointe.wordpress.com, Medium, and Ao3.

View All posts by Grace Lapointe

Poe’s stories convey in a few pages what some writers take hundreds of pages to tell. They contain wordplay and symbolism but also anticipate more realistic writers like Fyodor Dostoevsky. Before the formal field of psychology existed, Poe’s stories explored guilt, paranoia, delusions, and obsessions. Poe helped create the overlapping moods and genres of horror, mystery, historical fiction, slipstream, and science fiction and fantasy as we know them today.

Known mainly as a literary critic in his lifetime, Poe worked for several literary journals. Unlike many other 19 th century writers, Poe thought that fiction should never be didactic or moralizing. His theory and fiction helped define the short story as a form.

You can buy Poe’s Short Stories at bookstores, and most are available to read for free online at Project Gutenberg and other sites.

Sources disagree on how many works of fiction Poe wrote, although most estimate it was at least 70 or 80. For January 19, 2022, the 213 th anniversary of his birth, here is a ranking of ten of his best stories.

The Top 10 Poe Stories, Ranked

1. “The Tell-Tale Heart”

One of his shortest stories, this is the quintessential Poe story in many ways. It concisely showcases his recurring elements of guilt, paranoia, murder, and unnamed narrators rationalizing their actions. The murdered man’s heart beating through the floorboards is one of Poe’s creepiest, most iconic images, blurring the line between psychological and supernatural horror.

2. “The Cask of Amontillado”

The protagonist, Montressor, lures his acquaintance, Fortunato, into a wine cellar that’s actually a crypt. He then walls him up and leaves him inside to die. Montressor is one of Poe’s most terrifying and unreliable narrators. We never even learn “the thousand injuries” or final “insult” that Fortunato committed against Montressor in the first place. Poe’s grim sense of humor is underrated, but his characters often have ironic names. Fortunato means fortunate in Italian.

3. “The Fall of the House of Usher”

Dr. Oliver Tearle described this story as a gothic novel condensed into a short story. It contains many hallmarks of gothic literature from before and after Poe: decay, aristocracy, and an old house with family secrets, including incest. Guillermo del Toro’s horror film Crimson Peak and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s novel Mexican Gothic are excellent recent takes on gothic fiction that share some key elements with this story.

4. “The Pit and the Pendulum”

This story makes its suspense and danger seem immediate to both the narrator and readers. During the Inquisition in Europe centuries earlier, the unnamed narrator is trapped in a cell between two equally perilous forms of torture: the pit and the scythe-like, swinging pendulum blade. Its nightmarish imagery takes old cliches like being stuck in a crucible, or between a rock and a hard place, and realizes them, both literally and metaphorically.

5. The Masque of the Red Death

During a highly contagious epidemic, the Red Death, callous, creative Prince Prospero and his friends throw a lavish masquerade ball. They seem oblivious to the danger and their own privilege — and then the Red Death personified shows up. Today, people either return to this story or find it too on-the-nose during the COVID-19 pandemic.

6. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”

There’s debate as to whether Poe’s character Auguste Dupin was the first fictional detective . While Poe may not have coined the word “detective,” he influenced the entire mystery genre, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes . Dupin later appeared in two more Poe stories: “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” and “The Purloined Letter.” With Dupin, Poe established many conventions of detective stories. These include a private investigator, independent from the police department, who uses logical reasoning to solve crimes.

7. The Oval Portrait

A painter draws his wife’s life force into a portrait of her, killing her. This eerie story plays on ancient myths of mirrors and paintings capturing the subjects’ souls. Some critics consider this story a possible influence on Oscar Wilde’s Victorian novel The Picture of Dorian Gray .

8. “The Premature Burial”

The narrator has a phobia of being buried alive, and he describes supposedly true examples of this phenomenon. In the early 1800s, this would have been a reasonable fear, as it was theoretically possible and occasionally happened. Poe used different takes on live burial in other stories, including “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Cask of Amontillado.”

9. “The Man of the Crowd”

An anonymous observer in a crowd becomes fascinated with a stranger and follows him. This short story is often taught alongside poet Charles Baudelaire’s description of a flâneur or idler. As always, Poe’s ability to create suspense and his knowledge of history, Greek, and French make the story memorable. Both Poe and Baudelaire described writers as avid observers of life.

10. “The Black Cat”

Often paired with “The Tell-Tale Heart,” this story features another unnamed, unreliable, and violent narrator. He escalates from animal abuse to murder and is literally and figuratively haunted by his actions. As usual with Poe, the ambiguity makes it even creepier. We’re unsure whether anything supernatural occurs or if we can believe anything the narrator says.

Other Works

Edgar Allan Poe began writing poetry as a teenager , and his poems are just as fascinating and enduring as his stories. His most famous poems include The Raven , Annabel Lee , and “Lenore.” His critical theory includes “The Poetic Principle,” published posthumously and compiles several of his literary theory lectures.

Poe’s influence is everywhere in 20th and 21st century fiction, from Modernism to the twist endings of The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror . Horror movies with victims trapped in torture chambers are influenced by “The Pit and the Pendulum.” The modern thriller, particularly ones with confessions or narration by murderers, are also influenced by Poe’s stories. In 2019, Book Riot published a list of some examples of Poe references in pop culture, including The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror. In House of Salt and Sorrows , a 2019 YA gothic horror novel and fairytale retelling by Erin A. Craig, several character names reference Poe and his characters.

Can’t get enough of Poe’s stories and poems? Check out these songs inspired by Edgar Allan Poe and His Hideous Heart , a YA anthology of Poe retellings edited by Dahlia Adler.

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Biography of Edgar Allan Poe

by Robert Giordano , 27 June 2005 This is a short biography. Unlike many biographies that just seem to go on and on, I've tried to compose one short enough to read in a single sitting.

Poe's Childhood

Edgar Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809. That makes him Capricorn, on the cusp of Aquarius. His parents were David and Elizabeth Poe. David was born in Baltimore on July 18, 1784. Elizabeth Arnold came to the U.S. from England in 1796 and married David Poe after her first husband died in 1805. They had three children, Henry, Edgar, and Rosalie. Elizabeth Poe died in 1811, when Edgar was 2 years old. She had separated from her husband and had taken her three kids with her. Henry went to live with his grandparents while Edgar was adopted by Mr. and Mrs. John Allan and Rosalie was taken in by another family. John Allan was a successful merchant, so Edgar grew up in good surroundings and went to good schools. When Poe was 6, he went to school in England for 5 years. He learned Latin and French, as well as math and history. He later returned to school in America and continued his studies. Edgar Allan went to the University of Virginia in 1826. He was 17. Even though John Allan had plenty of money, he only gave Edgar about a third of what he needed. Although Edgar had done well in Latin and French, he started to drink heavily and quickly became in debt. He had to quit school less than a year later.

Poe in the Army

Edgar Allan had no money, no job skills, and had been shunned by John Allan. Edgar went to Boston and joined the U.S. Army in 1827. He was 18. He did reasonably well in the Army and attained the rank of sergeant major. In 1829, Mrs. Allan died and John Allan tried to be friendly towards Edgar and signed Edgar's application to West Point. While waiting to enter West Point, Edgar lived with his grandmother and his aunt, Mrs. Clemm. Also living there was his brother, Henry, and young cousin, Virginia. In 1830, Edgar Allan entered West Point as a cadet. He didn't stay long because John Allan refused to send him any money. It is thought that Edgar purposely broke the rules and ignored his duties so he would be dismissed.

A Struggling Writer

In 1831, Edgar Allan Poe went to New York City where he had some of his poetry published. He submitted stories to a number of magazines and they were all rejected. Poe had no friends, no job, and was in financial trouble. He sent a letter to John Allan begging for help but none came. John Allan died in 1834 and did not mention Edgar in his will. In 1835, Edgar finally got a job as an editor of a newspaper because of a contest he won with his story, " The Manuscript Found in a Bottle ". Edgar missed Mrs. Clemm and Virginia and brought them to Richmond to live with him. In 1836, Edgar married his cousin, Virginia. He was 27 and she was 13. Many sources say Virginia was 14, but this is incorrect. Virginia Clemm was born on August 22, 1822. They were married before her 14th birthday, in May of 1836. In case you didn't figure it out already, Virginia was Virgo. As the editor for the Southern Literary Messenger , Poe successfully managed the paper and increased its circulation from 500 to 3500 copies. Despite this, Poe left the paper in early 1836, complaining of the poor salary. In 1837, Edgar went to New York. He wrote "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym" but he could not find any financial success. He moved to Philadelphia in 1838 where he wrote " Ligeia " and " The Haunted Palace ". His first volume of short stories, "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque" was published in 1839. Poe received the copyright and 20 copies of the book, but no money. Sometime in 1840, Edgar Poe joined George R. Graham as an editor for Graham's Magazine . During the two years that Poe worked for Graham's, he published his first detective story, " The Murders in the Rue Morgue " and challenged readers to send in cryptograms, which he always solved. During the time Poe was editor, the circulation of the magazine rose from 5000 to 35,000 copies. Poe left Graham's in 1842 because he wanted to start his own magazine. Poe found himself without a regular job once again. He tried to start a magazine called The Stylus and failed. In 1843, he published some booklets containing a few of his short stories but they didn't sell well enough. He won a hundred dollars for his story, " The Gold Bug " and sold a few other stories to magazines but he barely had enough money to support his family. Often, Mrs. Clemm had to contribute financially. In 1844, Poe moved back to New York. Even though " The Gold Bug " had a circulation of around 300,000 copies, he could barely make a living. In 1845, Edgar Poe became an editor at The Broadway Journal . A year later, the Journal ran out of money and Poe was out of a job again. He and his family moved to a small cottage near what is now East 192nd Street. Virginia's health was fading away and Edgar was deeply distressed by it. Virginia died in 1847, 10 days after Edgar's birthday. After losing his wife, Poe collapsed from stress but gradually returned to health later that year.

In June of 1849, Poe left New York and went to Philadelphia, where he visited his friend John Sartain. Poe left Philadelphia in July and came to Richmond. He stayed at the Swan Tavern Hotel but joined "The Sons of Temperance" in an effort to stop drinking. He renewed a boyhood romance with Sarah Royster Shelton and planned to marry her in October. On September 27, Poe left Richmond for New York. He went to Philadelphia and stayed with a friend named James P. Moss. On September 30, he meant to go to New York but supposedly took the wrong train to Baltimore. On October 3, Poe was found at Gunner's Hall, a public house at 44 East Lombard Street, and was taken to the hospital. He lapsed in and out of consciousness but was never able to explain exactly what happened to him. Edgar Allan Poe died in the hospital on Sunday, October 7, 1849. The mystery surrounding Poe's death has led to many myths and urban legends. The reality is that no one knows for sure what happened during the last few days of his life. Did Poe die from alcoholism? Was he mugged? Did he have rabies? A more detailed exploration of Poe's death can be found here .

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Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography Paperback – December 26, 1997

Now in paperback―the classic, monumental biography of Poe by Arthur Hobson Quinn.

Renowned as the creator of the detective story and a master of horror, the author of "The Red Mask of Death," "The Black Cat," and "The Murders of the Rue Morgue," Edgar Allan Poe seems to have derived his success from suffering and to have suffered from his success. "The Raven" and "The Tell-Tale Heart" have been read as signs of his personal obsessions, and "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Descent into the Maelstrom" as symptoms of his own mental collapse. Biographers have seldom resisted the opportunities to confuse the pathologies in the stories with the events in Poe's life. Against this tide of fancy, guesses, and amateur psychologizing, Arthur Hobson Quinn's biography devotes itself meticulously to facts. Based on exhaustive research in the Poe family archive, Quinn extracts the life from the legend, and describes how they both were distorted by prior biographies.

• Print length 804 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date December 26, 1997
• Dimensions 6 x 1.76 x 9 inches
• ISBN-10 0801857309
• ISBN-13 978-0801857300
• See all details

Editorial Reviews

Book description, from the back cover, about the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Johns Hopkins University Press; First Edition (December 26, 1997)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 804 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0801857309
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0801857300
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.84 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.76 x 9 inches
• #1,246 in American Literature Criticism
• #5,121 in Author Biographies

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Arthur hobson quinn.

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Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer of primarily poetry and short stories that explored themes of death, regret, and lost love. Read the overview below to gain an understanding of the author and his work and explore the previews of analysis and criticism that invite further interpretation.

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Edgar allan poe topic overview.

"Poe, Edgar Allan (1809-1849), An Introduction to." Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism Volume 211, Gale, 2009.

Known for his keen intellect and vivid, often macabre imagination, Edgar Allan Poe is regarded by many scholars as one of the most groundbreaking authors of early-nineteenth-century America. Although Poe is remembered by most readers as the author of such stories as "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Fall of the House of Usher," critics recognize him for the versatility and range of his talents.

A number of commentators have credited Poe with inventing the modem detective story; indeed, many of his principal techniques, particularly his use of deductive reasoning to elucidate the complexities of criminal behavior, form the foundation of the crime genre. At the same time, Poe's in-depth explorations of the interior lives of his characters helped pave the way for psychological realism, inspiring a number of later fiction writers, among them Fyodor Dostoevsky. Poe's critical writings, notably those on the relationship between philosophical principles and artistic style, also influenced the aesthetic theories of Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, and other members of the French symbolist movement.

In spite of his far-reaching impact, Poe has also had his share of detractors over the years: Henry James was intensely critical of Poe's work, while T. S. Eliot famously dismissed his writings as "pre-adolescent." The second half of the twentieth century witnessed a reevaluation of Poe's legacy, however, as modem critics and theorists began to recognize his profound effect on modem literature and thought.

Biographical Information

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809, the second son of David Poe Jr. and Elizabeth Arnold Poe, both stage actors. The family lived in abject poverty and moved frequently during Poe's first years, during which time his parents pursued acting engagements in New York, Maryland, and Virginia. Poe's father abandoned the family when Poe was still a small child, and his mother died in Richmond, Virginia, in December 1811. Shortly after his mother's death, Poe was adopted by John Allan, a wealthy Richmond merchant, and his wife, Frances. In 1815 the young boy went with the Allans to Great Britain, living in Scotland and London for the next five years. After returning to Richmond in 1820, Poe attended private schools, where he excelled in literature, classics, and oratory; he also began to write poetry.

In spite of his academic accomplishments, Poe remained relatively isolated. Scholar Eric W. Carlson has argued that Poe's humble origins remained a source of shame throughout his life and that because of his background he never gained acceptance among Richmond's social elite. In 1826, Poe became a student at the University of Virginia, studying classical and modern languages. Although his adoptive father paid Poe's tuition and lodging, he refused him additional funds for books and other basic expenses. To cover his living costs, Poe turned to gambling, incurring massive debts that forced him to withdraw from the university. Unable to repair his fractured relationship with Allan, Poe moved to Boston and enlisted in the army. He published his first book of verse, Tamerlane and Other Poems: By a Bostonian (1827), around this time. A second poetry collection, Al Aaraaf Tamerlane, and Minor Poems , was published in 1829. A year later Poe, intent on launching a military career, enrolled at the United States Military Academy at West Point; financial difficulties continued to plague him, however, and he abandoned his training after only six months. His third collection of verse, Poems, By Edgar A. Poe , came out in 1831.

After living briefly in New York City, Poe settled in Baltimore, where he moved in with his aunt, Maria Clemm. In Baltimore, Poe began writing short stories, publishing several of them in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier in 1832. In 1833, his story "MS. Found in a Bottle" won first prize in a contest promoted by the Baltimore Saturday Visitor . Although the prize earned Poe $50, it ultimately did little to alleviate his financial struggles, and John Allan's death in 1834 failed to provide Poe with an adequate inheritance. Desperate for a steady income, Poe accepted an offer to become a staff writer and editor for the Southern Literary Messenger , a new magazine based in Richmond. In 1835 he moved to Richmond with his aunt and her 12-year-old daughter, Virginia Clemm. Poe married Virginia a year later, shortly before her 14th birthday.

According to most biographical accounts, Poe thrived during his tenure at the Messenger ; he published more than 80 essays, poems, and reviews in the periodical, while gradually attracting a sizeable readership. In 1837, he resigned from his editorship, although he continued to contribute fiction and criticism to the magazine. For the next year Poe lived with his family in New York before relocating to Philadelphia in early 1838. During this period he published his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), as well as several important short stories, including "Ligeia" (1838) and "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839). In 1839 he took a position as the editor and principal literary critic of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine ; he was fired a year later, however, after attempting to launch his own rival magazine.

Poe's first book of short fiction, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque , was published in 1840. Over the next few years Poe published two additional story collections, The Prose Romances of Edgar A. Poe, No. 1. Containing the Murders in the Rue Morgue, and The Man That Was Used Up (1843) and Tales by Edgar A. Poe (1845), as well as his most significant book of poetry, The Raven and Other Poems (1845). Virginia contracted tuberculosis during this time; she died in January 1847. Poe's own health began to deteriorate, his condition exacerbated by heavy alcohol abuse.

In the remaining two years of his life, Poe was romantically involved with a series of women and was briefly engaged to the poet Sarah Helen Whitman, but their relationship ended abruptly in late 1848. That year saw the publication of Eureka: A Prose Poem , the final work published in Poe's lifetime. His struggle to earn a living and refrain from drinking continued to take its toll. He managed to place essays, stories, and poems in various magazines and delivered lectures on poetry. Poe died in Baltimore on October 7, 1849. Although biographers speculate that his death was alcohol related, the exact cause remains unknown. A posthumous collection of prose writings, The Literati . . . Together with Marginalia, Suggestions, and Essays (1850), was published a year after his death.

Major Works

To modern commentators Poe remains best known for his short stories, almost all of which were collected in three volumes published during his lifetime: Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque , The Prose Romances of Edgar A. Poe , and Tales by Edgar A. Poe . Many scholars divide Poe's short fiction into two categories: horror tales and detective stories. 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. In "The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843), a murderer is plagued by the persistent echo of his victim's heartbeat, compelling him to confess his crime; "The Black Cat" (1843) features a protagonist who becomes obsessed with killing his beloved pet cat; the narrator of "The Cask of Amontillado" (1846), tormented by the "thousand injuries" inflicted upon him by an old rival, achieves his long-awaited vengeance by burying his victim alive in a brick tomb. The sense of menace in other stories is far more subtle. In "Some Words with a Mummy" (1845), a revivified Egyptian mummy, speaking to a group of modern scientists, offers an ominous indictment of nineteenth-century democracy. The narrator of "Ligeia" (1838), distressed by the death of his first wife, imagines her soul's resurrection in the body of his second wife. "Ligeia" is also noteworthy in that it contains the poem "The Conqueror Worm," a dark vision of the power and inevitability of death.

Poe's detective stories concern the complex, sometimes misleading relationship between human reasoning and empirical reality. Characterized by Poe himself as tales of "ratiocination," these stories revolve around crimes so strange and inexplicable that they prove nearly impossible to solve. The best known of these works include "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), "The Mystery of Marie Roget" (1842), and "The Purloined Letter" (1845). These three stories feature the character C. Auguste Dupin, an amateur sleuth whose powers of imagination and deductive reasoning enable him to recognize crucial details that elude more conventional police inspectors. A number of scholars have asserted that Dupin became the prototype of the modem fictional detective and served as the model for such characters as Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot.

In addition to his fiction, Poe authored a number of important poems over the course of his career. Although his poems are not widely read today, several are still familiar to modem readers; among the most famous are "To Helen" (1831), "Lenore" (1843), and "The Raven" (1845). Poe's critical writings, in particular his review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's story collction Twice-Told Tales , also remain noteworthy among scholars. The commentary, first published in April 1842, has played a pivotal role in the field of Hawthorne criticism. In the 1846 essay "The Philosophy of Composition," Poe undertakes an in-depth analysis of his own artistic methods. "The Poetic Principle," first delivered as a lecture in 1848 and later included in the posthumous volume The Literati, offers an invaluable exposition of Poe's aesthetic philosophy, notably the idea that the ultimate aim of art is art itself, independent of social or political contexts. This idea influenced European aesthetic theories of the late nineteenth century and became the foundation of the French symbolist movement.

More Articles

The motive for murder in the cask of amontillado by edgar allan poe.

Baraban examines the reason for Montresor's murder of Fortunato in "The Cask of Amontillado," suggesting that Fortunato "is being punished for his arrogance and for insulting someone who is equal or superior to him."

The Art of Incorporative Exclusion: The Masque of the Red Death

Freedman surveys such themes as narrative self-reflexivity, the primal fear of blood, and the conflict between art and reality in "The Masque of the Red Death."

Poe in Love: Pedophilia, Morbidity, and the Logic of Slavery

Coviello discusses racial and sexual overtones in Poe's body of work.

House of Mirrors: Edgar Allan Poe's the Fall of the House of Usher

Timmerman describes Poe's attempt to unify Enlightenment thinking with romanticism in "The Fall of the House of Usher," and observes similar concerns with cosmic unity in the prose poem Eureka.

The Function of Terror in the Work of Edgar Allan Poe

Garrison identifies aspects of "artistic integrity" in Poe's body of work. Garrison suggests that Poe's stories employ terror as a "vehicle for the sentiment of Poesy."

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The best edgar allan poe books, recommended by shawn rosenheim.

The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar Poe to the Internet by Shawn Rosenheim

You can’t turn on a television or pass an airport bookstore without seeing the influence of America’s most generative writer, Edgar Allan Poe. He orginated true life crime and detective fiction, sci-fi and horror story tropes, and wrote unforgettable poems. Poe expert Shawn Rosenheim , a professor at Williams College, recommends where to start with Poe, as well as the best books about his influence.

Interview by Eve Gerber

Poe: Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays by Edgar Allan Poe

The Detective Stories of Edgar Allan Poe: Three Tales Featuring C. Auguste Dupin by Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography by Arthur Hobson Quinn

Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe by Daniel Hoffman

Pym: A Novel by Mat Johnson

1 Poe: Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays by Edgar Allan Poe

2 the detective stories of edgar allan poe: three tales featuring c. auguste dupin by edgar allan poe, 3 edgar allan poe: a critical biography by arthur hobson quinn, 4 poe poe poe poe poe poe poe by daniel hoffman, 5 pym: a novel by mat johnson.

Y ou’ve edited and written books about Edgar Allan Poe. Please introduce him to readers who may not be familiar with him and make the case that Poe deserves a central place in the pantheon of nineteenth century American writers.

What’s also important is the fact that Poe lived by his literary work as a writer and editor, at a time when doing so was almost impossible. He had to craft a living out of nothing but his wits and industry. He was absolutely an aesthete—he more or less coined the phrase “art for art’s sake”—but he was also deeply attuned to the market. He had to be. His aestheticism and his commercial intelligence came together in his belief that the proper work of fiction isn’t to construct a well-made realist world, but to create an intense effect in readers –  to do something to them. Sensation was his primary goal, and if it meant writing about lurid subjects—murderous orangutans, bodies walled up alive, spiritual possession—he was fine with that, though it set the teeth of many American critics on edge. Abroad it was a different story – Poe has always been enormously popular, and he deeply influenced writers as different as Arthur Conan Doyle , Fyodor Dostoevsky , and Charles Baudelaire. There are probably 40 books just on Poe’s influence on different national literatures, but at home, in America, he was often seen as something of an embarrassment.  But his interest in effect is one of the things that makes Poe so modern.

Poe was a cryptic writer and also a cryptologist. Can you please brief us on this aspect of his legacy, which you explored in your book, The Cryptographic Imagination ?

Poe invented detective fiction in 1841, with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Since then, detective stories have colonized the world. They became popular partly because they provided a way for readers to negotiate the dangers and pleasures of cities, which, beginning in the early 19th century, became larger, denser, and filled with immigrants – in short, they became socially illegible to a much greater degree.

“Poe often pitches his stories between terror and absurdity”

Turning to the books, you first recommendation is Poe: Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays . Why is the Library of America collection the right place to start?

It’s a beautifully made book—well-bound with lovely paper. The editorial choices are smart. And in one volume you get most of what Poe wrote: all the poetry, all the stories, his sole novel ( The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym) and much of his criticism and essays. Which is great, because readers can dip in wherever they like, and watch as Poe takes an idea and works it through different genres, shifting from, say, gothic romance to satire to speculative fiction. The book captures the restlessness of his invention.

Please describe a few of your favorites from this collection.

Maybe the key thing Poe offers is how much pleasure there can be in the deep absorption produced by reading a sonically dense, image-rich story or poem – and how that pleasure can be doubled by a style that leads us up to the very edge of disbelief. It’s there in the first line spoken by the unreliable narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart”:  “TRUE! – nervous – very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?” Well, maybe because you murdered an old man for no particular reason, hid his dismembered body under the floorboards, and now are so tortured by the sound of his still-beating heart that you’re about to confess to the police. Is this horror or humor?  Poe often pitches his stories between terror and absurdity. The real interest is less the crime itself than the contest between how the arrogant, erudite narrator wants to present himself, and what readers can see despite his best efforts.

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Next, you’ve chosen a capsule collection from Soft Skull. Please tell me about The Detective Stories of Edgar Allan Poe: Three Tales Featuring C. Auguste Dupin

It contains three stories, and each of them represents what is possible to do in the genre.

The first is “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the first detective story ever. It establishes the convention of the reclusive but brilliant detective along with his sidekick who narrates the story. It’s the first locked-room mystery. Two bodies are found stuffed into a chimney in a locked apartment in Paris and nobody can figure out how it happened. It sets up so many of the tropes that are now familiar from detective fiction. Although Dupin is physically unprepossessing, he decodes the crime scene like a mind reader.

“The Purloined Letter” concerns a missing piece of royal correspondence whose contents, if publicized, will be disastrous to the regime. So the detective sets out to find the letter. It’s the forerunner of postmodern detective fiction by the likes of Jorge Luis Borges or Paul Auster, where the mysteries are metaphysical puzzles about language and thought as much as they’re attempts to solve a crime.

“Sensation was his primary goal”

The third story, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” is the first murder mystery to be based on a real case – the story of Mary Rogers, a Broadway salesgirl whose strangled body washed up along the Hudson. Poe transposes the story to Paris, but Poe quotes at great length from actual newspaper articles, assuming that he’s smart enough to figure out what actually happened. In fact, he gets it wrong – Rogers died of a botched abortion, not of murder – but the disturbing pattern of the hyperrational male obsessively inspecting a dead female body sets the pattern still followed by shows like CSI today.

Sirs Arthur Conan Doyle and Alfred Hitchcock are both blurbed on the back of this book. You sketched Poe’s imprint on detective stories. Say a few more words about his impact on film?

Turning to nonfiction, you recommend Arthur Hobson Quinn’s Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography . Please tell me about it.

It’s an older biography, but it’s the best. Most recent biographies overemphasize the gothic elements in Poe’s life, making him out to be a version of his obsessive characters. That’s an injustice. Poe certainly could be melancholic, and he had a terrible problem with drinking. But he was also a very canny, extremely hardworking writer. There were very few American writers in Poe’s time who could support themselves through literature alone, partly because there were no international copyright agreements, and publishers could pirate Dickens, etc., for free. So Melville became a customs agent. Hawthorne became a diplomat. But Poe hustled and hustled, working as an editor, an exacting critic, and writer for his entire life. At a time when literary criticism was mostly puffery—praising writers who could help your career—Poe  actually offered sophisticated insights into American writing. Quinn details Poe’s professional and personal life in a way that makes him real.

For a long time, Poe had bad luck in his biographers. His first biographer was his literary executor, Rufus Griswold. But Griswold hated Poe. He wrote a biography full of lies and exaggerations. For a long time, those lies served as the conventional wisdom about Poe. Quinn details the difference between what Griswold alleged and what the records show in very revealing ways.

If Poe wrote his own life of Poe, he surely would’ve focused on the lurid details of his own life. What were the sensational details that could be plucked out of the story of the hardworking writer’s life? What were the sensational aspects of his biography that made him subject to this misinterpretation?

Well, he married his cousin Virginia when she was 13. It wasn’t as aberrant then, but it was still unusual and remarked on. They seem to have been very happy together until she contracted tuberculosis – one of the reasons the disease is so common in his writing. For years, she would oscillate between near-death sickness and apparent health. That oscillation tortured Poe, who couldn’t help but imagine that she was recovering, even as he carried the lurking knowledge of the truth.

Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe by poet Daniel Hoffman is your next choice.

Hoffman is a very talented poet and critic who brings the right spirit to his project by making his own relationship with Poe’s writing a part of his study. He’s full of sharp insights, but his voice is engaging and human. The poet James Russell Lowell has a great line about Poe: “Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.” Poe is an erratic writer: some of his writing is juvenile, or just plain whacked. That’s partly because Poe was often writing under economic pressure but, also, as Hoffman shows, because Poe was such an experimentalist. He was always exploring new ways to influence his readers.

Hoffman gets at the fact that Poe creates incredibly absorptive stories and poems. If you like them, you disappear into them, they become their own world. Poe stories aren’t aimed at illuminating the real world in a literal way, they create an alternative experience. Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe is a lot of fun to read. It’s playful and experimental, providing an account of the ways that Poe shaped Hoffman’s sense of his own possibilities as a writer.

What should we know about Poe’s poetry?

Poe’s poetry is extremely musical. It’s full of complicated rhymes and intricate sound patterns. Since about 1900, American poetry has moved toward a more vernacular free verse that usually does away with rhyme. Poe explores the pleasure of repetition and pattern in extravagant ways. His poems are intricate ornaments for your ears, as well as for your mind.

“He had to craft a living out of nothing but his wits and industry”

Finally, you recommend Pym: A Novel , by contemporary novelist Mat Johnson. This is a satirical fantasy story that made countless best of the year lists back in 2011.

Poe only wrote one novel— The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym— and even that breaks off suddenly, with no proper ending. Pym: A Novel is a comic satire that uses Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket to engage the blinding and destructive effects of whiteness in American culture.

Pym starts out as an adventure at sea, with shipwrecks and mutinies and cannibalism. Eventually, Pym arrives at an island called Tsalal, where the inhabitants are entirely black – even their teeth are black – and are terrified of whiteness. The black-skinned figures attack the crew, and Pym and his racially-mixed companion Dirk Peters hide out in enormous Hebrew hieroglyphs cut a hundred feet into the ground. Once they escape, they sail toward the South Pole. The water turns warm, and then hot; ash falls from the sky; and then, as a huge white figure emerges from the ocean mist, the novel ends. It’s a crazy book, but influential. Toni Morrison recommends it as a way to illuminate the structural heart of American racism.

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Mat Johnson, a Black graphic novelist and critic, rewrites Poe’s story today. Now the main character is a Black professor of literature who pursues the story of Pym to Antarctica, where he finds a tribe of savage white creatures, a biosphere built by a character modeled on the painter Thomas Kincaid, and storerooms full of Little Debbie snack cakes. Johnson’s satire takes on many of the absurdities in American attitudes toward race, but it’s also an extremely smart reading of Arthur Gordon Pym , which Johnson quotes from and parodies at length. In Johnson’s hands, Poe’s racism becomes a resource for understanding how America’s caste system developed – in particular, how it relied on an unmarked invisibility around whiteness that locked in forms of domination and control.  Johnson is also alive to the instability of Poe’s racism, as ambivalent figures like Peters turn out to be stronger, smarter and more poised than the ostensible hero. Opening up the perversity of racial ideologies is an essential part of destroying their social power, and Johnson’s satire does that in provocative, often hilarious ways.

You mentioned that Verne wrote a book inspired by Poe. H. G. Wells also acknowledged Poe as an influence. How does Poe continue to influence fantasy ?

Elements of his plots, bits of his poetry, characters borrowed from his works continue to show up in weirdly diverse places – Lovecraft Country is an interesting example, because it reworks Lovecraft, and by implication Poe, partly to wrestle with the racism of the original works. At other times, Poe becomes an icon for the kind of intensity the filmmakers or writers want to achieve – again, in works as different as Picnic at Hanging Rock  or The Lost Boys, or Truffaut’s adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 , where the central character chooses to save and memorize Poe’s Tales of Mystery & Imagination rather than burn it.

So, the most macabre of writers is the one whose influence is most immortal?

Just so. In large part, that’s because we now live in a world where Poe’s aesthetics of intensity have carried the day. I’m still astonished to see the range of people who have a vital relation to Poe – often people you’d never suspect of reading 19th century literature.  Unlike Hawthorne, say, Poe doesn’t rely on English professors for his continued success.

March 3, 2021

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Shawn Rosenheim

Shawn Rosenheim is Professor of English at Williams College in Massachusetts.

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