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Edgar Allen Poe Biography
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Section: UNITS
adapted from poemuseum.org
Quick Facts
Birth Date: January 19, 1809
Death Date: October 7, 1849
Place of Birth: Boston, Massachusetts
American writer, poet and critic Edgar Allan Poe is famous for his tales and
poems of horror and mystery, including "The Fall of the House of Usher,"
"The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Raven."
The name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women
who return from the dead. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics as “The
Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Raven,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” This versatile writer’s work includes short
stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a book of scientific theory, and hundreds of essays and book reviews. He is
widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the science fiction
genre, but he made his living as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. Poe’s reputation today
rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry.
Just as the bizarre characters in Poe’s stories have captured the public imagination, so too has Poe himself. He
is often seen as a morbid (gloomy), mysterious figure lurking in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or
crumbling castles. This is the Poe of legend. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a
biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame (insult) the author’s name.
The real Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston on January 19, 1809, but within three years, both of his
parents had died. Poe was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine
Allan in Richmond, Virginia, while his brother and sister went to live with other families. Mr. Allan reared Poe
to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe dreamt of emulating his childhood hero, the British
poet Lord Byron. The backs of some of Allan’s ledger sheets reveal early poetic verses scrawled in a young
Poe’s handwriting and show how little interest Edgar had in the tobacco business.
In 1826, Poe left Richmond to attend the University of Virginia, where he excelled in his classes but
accumulated considerable debt. The miserly Allan had sent Poe to college with less than a third of the funds he
needed, and Poe soon took up gambling to raise money to pay his expenses. By the end of his first term Poe
was so desperately poor that he burned his furniture to keep warm. Humiliated by his poverty and furious with
Allan, Poe was forced to drop out of school and return to Richmond. However, matters continued to worsen.
He visited the home of his fiancée, Elmira Royster, only to discover that she had become engaged to another man.
The heartbroken Poe’s last few months in the Allan mansion were punctuated with increasing hostility toward
Allan until Poe finally stormed out of the home in a quest to become a great poet and to find adventure. He
became a great poet by publishing his first book Tamerlane when he was only eighteen; to find adventure, he
enlisted in the United States Army. Two years later he entered the United States Military Academy at West
Point while continuing to write and publish poetry, but after only eight months at West Point Poe was thrown out.
Broke and alone, Poe turned to Baltimore—his late father’s home—and called upon relatives in the city. One
of Poe’s cousins robbed him in the night, but another relative, Poe’s aunt Maria Clemm, became a new mother
to him and welcomed him into her home. Clemm’s daughter, Virginia, first acted as a courier (messenger) to
carry letters to Poe’s lady loves but soon became the object of his desire.
While Poe was in Baltimore, John Allan died, leaving Poe out of his will, which did, however, provide for an
illegitimate child whom Allan had never seen. By then Poe was living in poverty but had started publishing his
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short stories, one of which won a contest sponsored by the Saturday Visiter. The
connections Poe established through the contest allowed him to publish more stories
and to eventually gain an editorial position at the Southern Literary Messenger in
Richmond.
It was at this magazine that Poe finally found his life’s work as a magazine writer.
Within a year Poe helped make the Messenger the most popular magazine in the
south with his sensational stories and his scathing (scornful/sarcastic) book reviews.
Poe soon developed a reputation as a fearless critic who not only attacked an
author’s work but also insulted the author and the northern literary establishment.
Poe targeted some of the most famous writers in the country; one of his victims was
the anthologist and editor Rufus Griswold.
At the age of 27, Poe brought Maria and Virginia Clemm to Richmond and married Virginia, who was not yet
fourteen. The marriage proved a happy one, but money was always tight. Dissatisfied with his low pay and lack
of editorial control at the Messenger, Poe moved to New York City and to Philadelphia a year later, where he
wrote for a number of different magazines. In spite of his growing fame, Poe was still barely able to make a
living. For the publication of his first book of short stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, he was paid
with 25 copies of his book. He would soon become a champion for the cause of higher wages for writers as
well as for an international copyright law. To change the face of the magazine industry, he proposed starting
his own journal, but he failed to find the necessary funding.
The January 1845 publication of “The Raven” made Poe a household name. He was again living in New York
City and was now famous enough to draw large crowds to his lectures—he also began demanding better pay
for his work. He published two books that year, and briefly lived his dream of running his own magazine when
he bought out the owners of the Broadway Journal. The failure of the venture, his wife’s deteriorating health,
and rumors spreading about Poe’s relationship with a married woman, drove him from the city in 1846. At this
time he moved to a tiny cottage in the country. It was there, in the winter of 1847, that Virginia died of
tuberculosis at the age of 24. Her death devastated Poe and left him unable to write for months. His critics
assumed he would soon be dead. They were right. Poe only lived another two years and spent much of that
time traveling from one city to the next giving lectures and finding backers for his latest proposed magazine
project to be called The Stylus.
He returned to Richmond in the summer of 1849 and reconnected with his first fiancée, Elmira Royster Shelton
who was now a widow. They became engaged and intended to marry in Richmond after Poe’s return from a
trip to Philadelphia and New York. However, on the way to Philadelphia, Poe stopped in Baltimore and
disappeared for five days. He was found in the bar room of a public house that was being used as a polling
place for an election. The magazine editor Joseph Snodgrass sent Poe to Washington College Hospital, where
Poe spent the last days of his life far from home and surrounded by strangers. Neither Poe’s mother-in-law nor
his fiancée knew what had become of him until they read about it in the newspapers. Poe died on October 7,
1849 at the age of forty. The exact cause of Poe’s death remains a mystery.
Days after Poe’s death, his literary rival Rufus Griswold wrote a
libelous (slanderous/insulting) obituary of the author in a misguided
attempt at revenge for some of the offensive things Poe had said and
written about him. Griswold followed the obituary with a memoir in
which he portrayed Poe as a drunken, womanizing madman with no
morals and no friends. Griswold’s attacks were meant to cause the
public to dismiss Poe and his works, but the biography had exactly the
opposite effect and instead drove the sales of Poe’s books higher than
they had ever been during the author’s lifetime. Griswold’s distorted
image of Poe created the Poe legend that lives to this day while
Griswold is only remembered (if at all) as Poe’s first biographer.
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Questions and Answers about Edgar Allan Poe
adapted from poemuseum.org
Q: Where was Edgar Allan Poe born?
A: Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts on January 19th, 1809.
Q: So he’s not from Baltimore?
A: No. Poe lived in Baltimore for about four years in the 1830s, but did not grow up
there. He died in Baltimore on a trip in 1849 and thus was buried there.
Q: Did he live anywhere other than Richmond and Baltimore?
A: Yes. In addition to the five years he spent in London, England as a child (age 6-11),
he also lived in and around Philadelphia and New York. He also briefly lived in Boston
and while in the U.S. Army was stationed there and also near Charleston, South
Carolina and Hampton, Virginia.
Q: Why did Poe write such dark stories?
A: Poe wrote for magazines which demanded stories that would appeal to a mass audience, so he gave them
what they wanted. In fact, he only wrote about fifteen horror stories out of a total of 70 tales. Poe actually
produced far more comedies than terror tales. He also wrote science fiction, mysteries, adventure stories,
scientific essays, and a book about seashells. Today’s readers tend to prefer his horror stories, but in Poe’s
time, his audience liked the mysteries better. He last book of short stories, Tales of Edgar A. Poe (1845), only
contained one horror story among a collection of mysteries and science fiction. Although he suffered bouts of
depression after his wife’s death, Poe wasn’t a terribly morbid or melancholy person. Mary Bronson, who, as a
young girl, visited Poe with her father, later recalled, “We saw Mr. Poe walking in his yard, and most agreeably
was I surprised to see a very handsome and elegant appearing gentleman, who welcomed us with a quiet,
cordial, and graceful politeness that ill accorded with my imaginary somber poet. I dare say I looked the
surprise I felt, for I saw an amused look on his face as I raised my eyes a second time…”
Q: What contributions did Poe make to world literature?
A: Poe revolutionized literature in a number of ways. He invented the detective story, made important
contributions that shaped the modern science fiction genre, and developed the tale of psychological terror. In
his criticism and essays, he championed the cause of Art for Art’s Sake at a time when most critics believed art
existed to instruct, edify, or propagandize. He thought that it was enough for a poem to be beautiful even (and
especially) if it did not try to teach the reader anything. European writers and critics of the time, like Charles
Baudelaire in France, praised Poe for this stance.
Q: What did Poe contribute to the mystery genre?
A: Poe made several important contributions to the mystery story. With only a handful of precedents, he
developed a new kind of fictional character—one who solves mysteries using reason, analysis, and keen
observational skills. Poe also gave his detective a sidekick, whose role in the story is to narrate the events and
to make the detective look good by acting astonished by the detective’s feats of reasoning. This is the same
purpose Dr. Watson would serve in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mysteries half a century later.
After inventing these primary characters, Poe continued by developing the standard mystery plots. Since each
of his detective stories was the first of its kind, he developed several different prototypes. “Murders in the Rue
Morgue” is the first “locked door” or “locked room” mystery, a subgenre of detective fiction in which someone
is murdered inside a room which is locked from the inside when the police break down the door to find there is
no visible way the murderer could have escaped. “The Mystery of Marie Roget” is the first detective story
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based on a true crime. “Thou Art the Man” is the first comic detective story. “The Gold-Bug” is the first major
treasure hunt mystery and the first use of a secret code in a mystery.
Several of the standard mystery plot devices also originated with Poe. In
“Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “Thou Art the Man,” we see an innocent
person wrongfully accused with the detective tasked with proving their
innocence. In “Thou Art the Man,” we see the first use of the culprit being the
“least likely suspect,” and we see the first use of this villain scattering false
clues to frame somebody else for the crime. In “The Purloined Letter” we see
the detective “profiling” the villain and trying to anticipate both his actions
and the police department’s actions in searching for the letter. He finds the
letter because he anticipates the villain has already anticipated how and
where the police will look for the letter. In “The Man of the Crowd,” we see
the use of surveillance to uncover the facts about a mysterious unknown man.
“The Gold-Bug” is the first mystery in which the solution involves decoding a
cryptogram, and this important work is also the first treasure-hunt mystery
(another popular subgenre of detective fiction).
Q: What inspired Poe to write his stories?
A: Poe found inspiration all around him, especially in newspapers or history books. Some of his stories were
based on actual events—like the headline-generating murder cases that Poe transformed into “The Mystery of
Marie Roget” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Other stories were inspired by historical events like the final days of
the Spanish Inquisition, which provided the setting for “The Pit and the Pendulum,” but Poe used the true
story as a jumping off point for his own thrilling tale of a prisoner trying to escape a series of strange tortures
that never really existed outside Poe’s imagination. Poe sometimes used places he lived as settings for stories,
so readers will find Richmond in “Premature Burial,” Sullivan’s Island in “The Gold-Bug,” and Charlottesville in
“A Tale of the Ragged Mountains.”
Q: What did Poe contribute to poetry?
A: Even though he composed only about fifty poems, many of these are among the best-known ever written.
Works like “Annabel Lee” and “The Bells” have inspired countless authors, visual artists, filmmakers, and
musicians. “The Raven” is so popular there have been several plays, a few ballets, and at least fifteen feature
films derived from it. Today “The Raven” is the only poem to have a National Football League team named
after it. Even more importantly, you can travel just about anywhere and find someone who can quote at least a
line or two from this very memorable composition. If we remember and enjoy Poe’s
poetry today, that was his intention. Even though, many other poets of
his time thought a poem was “good” if it taught the reader something.
Poe said it was far more important for a poem to entertain people. He
said his readers or listeners should be able to feel the beauty of his
poetry by their musical qualities alone—even if they didn’t understand
the words.
Q: What else did Poe do besides writing?
A: When he wasn’t writing, Poe enjoyed spending time at home with
his family, playing the flute, and taking long walks through the
countryside. He also owned many pets, including cats and songbirds.
He also expressed a great interest in astronomy.
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