Edgar Allan Poe

About this figure

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was born in Boston to two touring actors. His father left the family early, and his mother, Elizabeth Arnold Poe, died of tuberculosis when he was two, leaving him to be taken in, though never legally adopted, by a Richmond, Virginia merchant named John Allan and his wife Frances. The name "Allan" was folded into his own as a mark of that arrangement, one that gave him a comfortable upbringing but no secure claim on Allan's fortune. He attended the University of Virginia for less than a year before debts forced him out, then enlisted in the U.S. Army under an assumed name, and later won an appointment to West Point, only to get himself dismissed in 1831 after deliberately neglecting his duties once it was clear Allan would not support a military career. Allan died in 1834 and left him nothing.

Poe had already published poetry as a very young man, in Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827) and Al Aaraaf (1829), but he made his living chiefly as a magazine editor and critic, working through the 1830s and 1840s at the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, then Burton's Gentleman's Magazine and Graham's Magazine in Philadelphia, and later the Broadway Journal in New York. His reviews could be savagely exacting, and they built him a reputation as one of the sharpest and most feared critics writing in America. In 1836 he married his young cousin Virginia Clemm; she was still in her early teens, and the marriage record understated her age, a detail biographers still discuss without fully resolving his intentions.

His fiction reshaped what short prose could do. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), featuring the analytical detective C. Auguste Dupin, is widely credited as the first modern detective story, and Poe returned to Dupin in "The Mystery of Marie Roget" and "The Purloined Letter." His tales of psychological horror and guilt, among them "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Black Cat," and "The Cask of Amontillado," established a mode of tightly controlled, first-person dread that later writers of horror and suspense drew on directly. He also wrote his only complete novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), and essays on the theory of composition and of poetry. His poem "The Raven," published in January 1845, made him instantly famous on both sides of the Atlantic, though it earned him almost nothing.

Virginia died of tuberculosis in 1847, and Poe's health and finances worsened afterward. In late September 1849 he set out from Richmond, apparently intending to travel north, and on October 3 was found in Baltimore in a state of confusion and collapse; he died four days later without regaining enough clarity to explain what had happened to him. Historians still disagree about the cause: proposed explanations have included alcohol, a brain lesion, rabies, carbon monoxide, and even foul play, and no account has become settled fact. The record was further muddied by his literary rival Rufus Griswold, whose hostile obituary and memoir spread inaccuracies about Poe's character that took decades to correct.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.