Edgar Allan Poe

Life

Edgar Poe was born in Boston in 1809 to two traveling actors. His father left the family and his mother died of tuberculosis in Richmond, Virginia, before he was three. He was taken in, though never formally adopted, by John Allan, a Richmond tobacco merchant, and his wife Frances, from whom he took his middle name. The Allans lived in England and Scotland from 1815 to 1820, where Poe attended boarding schools. He entered the University of Virginia in 1826 but left within a year after running up gambling debts that Allan refused to pay. The relationship with his foster father broke down for good over the following years.

Poe enlisted in the army under a false name, published a first small volume of poems in 1827, secured an appointment to West Point in 1830 and got himself expelled in 1831. He then set out to live by writing, something almost no American had yet managed. He worked as an editor and critic for a series of magazines in Richmond, Philadelphia and New York, including the Southern Literary Messenger, Burton’s and Graham’s, raising their circulation with his reviews and tales and leaving each one after quarrels or drinking. In 1836 he married his cousin Virginia Clemm, then thirteen. The Raven made him a celebrity in 1845 but not solvent. Virginia died of tuberculosis in 1847. Poe died in Baltimore in October 1849, aged forty, after being found delirious in the street; the cause has never been settled.

Literary significance

Poe is one of the most influential American writers, and his influence has often been stronger abroad than at home. He effectively invented the detective story with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) and its successors, giving Conan Doyle the model for Sherlock Holmes. His tales of terror, among them “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat” and “The Pit and the Pendulum,” set the pattern for psychological horror. As a critic he argued for the short story and the short poem as forms built around a single effect, a theory that shaped later thinking about both. The French poets Baudelaire and Mallarmé translated and championed him, and through them he became a founding figure for the Symbolist movement. His poems, The Raven above all, are among the most recited in English.

Where to start

The Raven, in our catalog, takes ten minutes and shows his ear. The tales come next; our catalog includes a volume of his collected works, where “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” are the usual first stops.