Edgar Allan Poe

(1809–49). The greatest American teller of mystery and suspense tales in the 19th century was Edgar Allan Poe. In his mysteries he invented the modern detective story. In Poe’s poems, like his tales, his characters are tortured by nameless fears and longings. Today Poe is acclaimed as one of America’s greatest writers, but in his own lifetime he found little success.

• The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838)
• “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839)
• “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841)
• “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842)
• “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1843)
• “The Gold Bug” (1843)
• “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843)
• “The Purloined Letter” (1844)
• “The Raven” (1845)
• “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846)

Edgar Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 19, 1809. His parents were touring actors. After his mother died in 1811, Poe was taken into the home of John Allan, a wealthy merchant of Richmond, Virginia. His wife reared Edgar as her son, but Allan accepted the boy largely to please her. Later Poe took Allan as his middle name, but his signature was usually Edgar A. Poe.

In 1815 the Allans took Poe to Scotland and England, where John Allan hoped to grow his business. Poe went to boarding school for the next few years. Upon the family’s return to the United States in 1820, Poe continued his education in Richmond. In 1826 he entered the University of Virginia. Allan gave Poe only a small allowance, and the young man soon began owing money. He gambled and ran into greater debt, and he began to drink. Allan angrily withdrew Poe from school, and a few months later Poe left home.

Poe went to Boston in 1827. He persuaded a printer to issue some of his early poems in a small pamphlet. It was called Tamerlane, and Other Poems, and the title page said simply “By a Bostonian.”

Poe’s money was soon gone, and he enlisted in the U.S. Army under the name of Edgar A. Perry. In his two years in the army, he rose to be a regimental sergeant major. But he wanted to become an officer, thinking that such advancement would restore him to Allan’s favor. After the death of Mrs. Allan in 1829, Poe and Allan temporarily settled their differences. With Allan’s help Poe was granted an honorable discharge from the army. Poe then sought an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York.

Poe waited for more than a year to enter West Point. In the meantime he lived in Baltimore, Maryland. While there he published another volume of poetry, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829). On July 1, 1830, he was sworn in as a West Point cadet. He hated the discipline and the restraint of the school. When Allan married again, Poe lost all chance of becoming his heir. Poe deliberately neglected his classes and duties and was expelled after eight months.

After leaving West Point, Poe returned to Baltimore. There he lived with his father’s widowed sister, Maria Clemm, and her young daughter, Virginia Clemm.

Poe had wanted to be a writer from an early age, but he struggled to earn a living from his work. His first success came in 1833, when he entered a short story contest and won a prize of $50 for the story “MS. Found in a Bottle.” By 1835 he was the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger. The next year he married his cousin Virginia Clemm, who was only 13, and Maria Clemm stayed with the couple. The Poes had no children.

Poe’s stories, poems, and criticism in the magazine soon attracted attention, and Poe looked for wider opportunities. While in New York City in 1838 he published a long prose work titled The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Like many of his tales, it combines factual material with wild fantasy. In 1839 he became the coeditor of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. There he wrote “The Fall of the House of Usher,” a story of supernatural horror.

Later in 1839 Poe published a collection of his short stories titled Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (dated 1840). He resigned from Burton’s about June 1840 but returned in 1841 to edit its successor, Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine. He printed “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”—widely considered the first detective story ever published—in that magazine. In 1843 his mystery story “The Gold Bug” won a prize of $100 from the Philadelphia’s Dollar Newspaper. That success earned him great publicity. During this time his wife had become ill with tuberculosis, a bacterial disease that often affects the lungs.

In 1844 Poe and his family returned to New York City. There he wrote a false news article for The Sun that came to be known as “The Balloon Hoax.” The story convinced many readers that adventurers had flown in a gas balloon over the Atlantic Ocean from England to the United States. (The first airships didn’t cross the Atlantic until the early 1900s.) He also became the subeditor of the Evening Mirror under N.P. Willis. By now Poe was well known in literary circles, and the publication of The Raven and Other Poems and a selection of his Tales, both in 1845, increased his reputation.

Poe soon became editor of The Broadway Journal, a short-lived weekly newspaper in which he republished most of his short stories. The Poes lived in a cottage in Fordham (now in the borough of the Bronx). There for a few months in 1846 Poe wrote for Godey’s Lady’s Book. His gossipy sketches about personalities of the day angered some people.

The Poes were comfortable for a time, but Virginia Poe soon grew weaker from her illness. Edgar Allan Poe likewise began to experience ill health. During the winter of 1846–47 they had little food or fuel. Virginia Poe died on January 30, 1847.

After his wife’s death Poe became increasingly depressed and erratic. He courted various women in an unsuccessful attempt to find comfort for the loss of his wife. His lecture “Eureka” was published in 1848. It’s a mystical explanation of the universe that some reviewers hailed as a masterpiece while others dismissed it as nonsense.

In 1849 Poe became engaged to a childhood sweetheart, who by then was a wealthy Richmond widow. After making wedding plans, he set out for New York City from Richmond but disappeared in Baltimore. He was found five days after he disappeared and was very near death. He died without regaining full consciousness four days later on October 7, 1849. Poe was buried in Baltimore.

The cause of Poe’s death is still unknown in the 21st century. Scholars have come up with several theories:

• alcoholism: Poe had been known to engage in stretches of heavy drinking throughout his life.
• disease: A number of diseases have been proposed as possible causes of his death, including diabetes, heart disease, epilepsy, and tuberculosis.
• rabies: Another disease, rabies, may have taken Poe’s life. Rabies is passed to humans from the saliva of infected animals, including dogs. In his last days Poe drifted in and out of consciousness and spoke nonsense when he was awake. Once symptoms of rabies such as these begin, death follows within a few days, as was the case with Poe.
• violence: Poe may have been a victim of a violent crime. Cooping, or grabbing unwilling people off the street and forcing them to vote repeatedly for a political candidate, was common at the time. Victims were often beaten or forced to drink alcohol to make them obey. Shortly before his death, a confused Poe was found outside a polling location.

Poe was a master at writing the modern short story. He added suspense, unique characters, and vivid descriptions to his works. He is credited with writing the first detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841). His fictional French detective, C. Auguste Dupin, appeared in two other stories, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1845) and “The Purloined Letter” (1845). Poe also helped develop the Gothic horror story. Gothic horror often includes elements of death, madness, evil, and the supernatural.

Poe was the first American author to be widely read outside the United States. His reputation in France, especially, was strengthened by the French poet Charles Baudelaire, who read and translated Poe’s works in the 1850s. Poe was elected to the United States Hall of Fame in 1910. Since then his reputation in literature has been secure.

Find out more information in these articles:

• short story
• detective story
• Gothic fiction
• horror story
• Charles Baudelaire