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Edgar Allan Poe

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What are Edgar Allan Poe’s best-known works?

Edgar Allan Poe’s best-known works include the poems “To Helen” (1831), “ The Raven ” (1845), and “ Annabel Lee ” (1849); the short stories of wickedness and crime “ The Tell-Tale Heart ” (1843) and “ The Cask of Amontillado ” (1846); and the supernatural horror story “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839).

Edgar Allan Poe is credited with initiating the modern detective story , developing the Gothic horror story , and being a significant early forerunner of the science fiction form. Poe’s literary criticism , which put great stress upon correctness of language, metre, and structure and the importance of achieving a unity of mood or effect, shaped literary theory.

Edgar Allan Poe turned up in a tavern in Baltimore, Maryland, on October 3, 1849, in bad shape and nearly unresponsive and was soon admitted to a hospital. He drifted in and out of consciousness, hallucinating and speaking nonsense. On October 7 he died, although whether from drinking ,  heart failure , or other causes remains uncertain .

Edgar Allan Poe (born January 19, 1809, Boston , Massachusetts , U.S.—died October 7, 1849, Baltimore , Maryland) was an American short-story writer, poet, critic, and editor who is famous for his cultivation of mystery and the macabre . His tale “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) initiated the modern detective story , and the atmosphere in his tales of horror is unrivaled in American fiction. His “The Raven” (1845) numbers among the best-known poems in the national literature .

Poe was the son of the English-born actress Elizabeth Arnold Poe and David Poe, Jr., an actor from Baltimore. After his mother died in Richmond , Virginia, in 1811, he was taken into the home of John Allan, a Richmond merchant (presumably his godfather), and of his childless wife. He was later taken to Scotland and England (1815–20), where he was given a classical education that was continued in Richmond. For 11 months in 1826 he attended the University of Virginia , but his gambling losses at the university so incensed his guardian that he refused to let him continue, and Poe returned to Richmond to find his sweetheart, (Sarah) Elmira Royster, engaged. He went to Boston, where in 1827 he published a pamphlet of youthful Byronic poems, Tamerlane, and Other Poems . Poverty forced him to join the army under the name of Edgar A. Perry, but, on the death of Poe’s foster mother, John Allan purchased his release from the army and helped him get an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Before going, Poe published a new volume at Baltimore, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829). He successfully sought expulsion from the academy, where he was absent from all drills and classes for a week. He proceeded to New York City and brought out a volume of Poems , containing several masterpieces, some showing the influence of John Keats , Percy Bysshe Shelley , and Samuel Taylor Coleridge . He then returned to Baltimore, where he began to write stories. In 1833 his “ MS. Found in a Bottle ” won $50 from a Baltimore weekly, and by 1835 he was in Richmond as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger . There he made a name as a critical reviewer and married his young cousin Virginia Clemm, who was only 13. Poe seems to have been an affectionate husband and son-in-law.

Poe was dismissed from his job in Richmond, apparently for drinking, and went to New York City. Drinking was in fact to be the bane of his life. To talk well in a large company he needed a slight stimulant, but a glass of sherry might start him on a spree; and, although he rarely succumbed to intoxication, he was often seen in public when he did. This gave rise to the conjecture that Poe was a drug addict, but according to medical testimony he had a brain lesion. While in New York City in 1838 he published a long prose narrative, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym , combining (as so often in his tales) much factual material with the wildest fancies. It is considered one inspiration of Herman Melville ’s Moby Dick . In 1839 he became coeditor of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine in Philadelphia . There a contract for a monthly feature stimulated him to write “William Wilson” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” stories of supernatural horror. The latter contains a study of a neurotic now known to have been an acquaintance of Poe, not Poe himself.

Later in 1839 Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque appeared (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 , in which he printed “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” —the first detective story. In 1843 his “The Gold Bug” won a prize of $100 from the Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper , which gave him great publicity. In 1844 he returned to New York , wrote “The Balloon Hoax” for the Sun , and became subeditor of the New York Mirror under N.P. Willis, thereafter a lifelong friend. In the New York Mirror of January 29, 1845, appeared, from advance sheets of the American Review , his most famous poem, “The Raven,” which gave him national fame at once. Poe then became editor of the Broadway Journal , a short-lived weekly, in which he republished most of his short stories, in 1845. During this last year the now-forgotten poet Frances Sargent Locke Osgood pursued Poe. Virginia did not object, but “Fanny’s” indiscreet writings about her literary love caused great scandal. His The Raven and Other Poems and a selection of his Tales came out in 1845, and in 1846 Poe moved to a cottage at Fordham (now part of New York City), where he wrote for Godey’s Lady’s Book (May–October 1846) “The Literati of New York City”—gossipy sketches on personalities of the day, which led to a libel suit.

Poe’s wife, Virginia, died in January 1847. The following year he went to Providence , Rhode Island, to woo Sarah Helen Whitman , a poet. There was a brief engagement. Poe had close but platonic entanglements with Annie Richmond and with Sarah Anna Lewis, who helped him financially. He composed poetic tributes to all of them. In 1848 he also published the lecture “ Eureka,” a transcendental “explanation” of the universe, which has been hailed as a masterpiece by some critics and as nonsense by others. In 1849 he went south, had a wild spree in Philadelphia, but got safely to Richmond, where he finally became engaged to Elmira Royster, by then the widowed Mrs. Shelton, and spent a happy summer with only one or two relapses. He enjoyed the companionship of childhood friends and an unromantic friendship with a young poet, Susan Archer Talley.

Poe had some forebodings of death when he left Richmond for Baltimore late in September. There he died, although whether from drinking, heart failure , or other causes was still uncertain in the 21st century. He was buried in Westminster Presbyterian churchyard in Baltimore.

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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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AT THE SMITHSONIAN

Edgar allan poe: pioneer, genius, oddity.

On this day in 1849, America lost an innovative, unique and utterly strange literary giant

Joseph Stromberg

On October 3, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe was found on the streets of Baltimore in disarray.

“He’s muttering a variety of things that are indecipherable. Nobody really knows who he is, and he’s not wearing his own clothes,” says David C. Ward, a historian at the National Portrait Gallery . “It seems pretty clear that he was suffering from some sort of alcohol or drug overdose.”

By age 40, Poe had written reams of poetry, attempted to start his own literary journal and become one of the first Americans to support oneself strictly as a writer. But eventually, his mental illnesses and alcohol abuse caught up with him. “He’s wandering around and they put him in the charity hospital, and he suffers four days of what must have been fairly awful trouble,” Ward says. On this day in 1849, America lost one of its most innovative and unusual literary figures to a death as mysterious as his life and works.

He was born to David and Elizabeth Poe, both Boston actors, in 1809, but his father abandoned the family when Edgar was just a year old, and his mother died soon thereafter of tuberculosis. He was taken into the home of the Allans, a wealthy Virginia family, but things continued going downhill for little Edgar from there. “He had a very tempestuous relationship with his surrogate father,” says Ward. After spending an uneasy childhood in both Virginia and Britain, Poe left home to attend the University of Virginia, where he only lasted a year.

“He ran up large gambling debts, and Mr. Allan refused to pay them, so Poe drops out,” says Ward. “Ultimately, Allan rejects Poe, so there’s this element of double rejection in his life.”

After a stint as a cadet at West Point, Poe decided to devote his life to becoming a writer. “He is the first American who tried to make a living just simply by writing,” says Ward. “At the time, the other writers were usually ministers, or professors.” Over the next two decades, he obsessively crafted dark, mysterious poetry, then turned to short stories in a similar vein.

Deeply critical of contemporary literature, he held posts at various literary journals and discussed plans to start his own. Transcendentalism was one of the most prominent literary and philosophical concepts of the day, and held that individual spirituality and a connection to nature could provide meaning and insight to anyone. “He hated transcendentalism—he thought that it was just moonshine and propaganda,” Ward says. “He hated Longfellow, the preeminent poet of the day, who he saw as a fraud.”

During this time, he secretly married his first cousin, Virginia Clem. “He marries his 13-year-old cousin, which is, to be blunt, a little bit creepy,” says Ward. Soon, she too would suffer from tuberculosis, leading many to speculate that the presence of even more misery in his life further contributed to the nightmarish focus of his work.

Poe’s fixation with the macabre and gruesome cut completely against the grain of 19th-century American literature. His stories typically featured death, corpses and mourning. “Poe is totally against everything that America seemed to stand for. He’s dark, inward-turning and cerebral. Death-obsessed instead of life-obsessed,” Ward notes. “If Whitman is the poet of the open road, Poe is the poet of the closed room, of the grave.”

Poe became a household name with the publication of the poem “The Raven” in 1845, but his lasting influence is evident in a number of genres. “In 1841, be basically invents the detective story, with The Murders in the Rue Morgue ,’ Ward says. “His detective, Dupin, is the forerunner of Sherlock Holmes: he’s a cerebral, brainiac detective who solves problems by his brain powers.” Other stories influenced Jules Verne, leading to the emergence of the genre of science fiction.

The 1847 death of Virginia, coupled with Poe’s increasingly heavy drinking, pushed him ever further into despair. But even in his final moments, he handed over a mystery, one that his fans have puzzled over for more than a century.

“The kicker to all this is that Poe supposedly left a large trunk of his archives, and that has disappeared,” Ward says. “Poe, the inventor of the mystery story, leaves this trunk behind that we would think might provide a clue to his life, but disappears. It’s this final tantalizing mystery.”

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Poems & Poets

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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Edgar Allan Poe Biography

Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts. His parents, David Poe, Jr., and Elizabeth Arnold Poe, were struggling actors who died while Poe was a small child. The young Edgar was taken in by a wealthy Scottish tobacco exporter, John Allan, from whom he took his middle name.

For most of his early life, Poe lived in Richmond, Virginia, with the exception of a five-year period between 1815 and 1820 when the Allan family lived in England. Back in the United States, Poe attended an academy until 1826, when he entered the University of Virginia. He withdrew less than a year later because of various debts, many of them from gambling, which his foster father refused to help him pay. After quarreling with Allan about these debts, Poe left for Boston in the spring of 1827, where he enlisted in the Army under the name Edgar A. Perry.

In the summer of 1827, Poe’s first book, Tamerlane, and Other Poems , signed anonymously as “A Bostonian,” appeared, but neither the reading public nor the critics paid much attention to it. In January, 1829, Poe was promoted to the rank of sergeant major and was honorably discharged at his own request three months later. Near the end of 1829, Poe’s second book, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems , was published and was well received by the critics.

Shortly thereafter, Poe entered West Point Academy. After less than a year, however, either because he tired of the academy or because John Allan refused to pay his bills any longer, Poe got himself discharged from West Point by purposely neglecting his military duties. He then went to New York, where, with the help of some money raised by his West Point friends, he published Poems in 1831. After moving to Baltimore, where he lived at the home of his aunt, Mrs. Clemm, and his cousin Virginia, Poe entered five short stories in a contest sponsored by the Philadelphia Saturday Courier . Although he did not win the prize, the newspaper published all five of the pieces. In June, 1833, he entered another contest sponsored by the Baltimore Saturday Visiter and this time won the prize of fifty dollars for his story “MS. Found in a Bottle.”

During the following two years, Poe continued to write stories and to try to get them published. Even with the help of a new and influential friend, lawyer and writer John Pendleton Kennedy, Poe was mostly unsuccessful. His hopes for financial security became even more desperate in 1834 when John Allan died, leaving him out of his will. Kennedy finally succeeded in getting the Southern Literary Messenger to publish several of Poe’s stories and to offer Poe the job of editor, a position that he kept from 1835 to 1837. During this time, Poe published stories and poems in the Southern Literary Messenger . It was, however, with his extensive publication of criticism that he began to make his mark in American letters.

In 1836, Poe married his cousin, Virginia Clemm, a decision that, because of her young age and her relationship to Poe, has made him the subject of much adverse criticism and psychological speculation. In 1837, after disagreements with the owner of the Southern Literary Messenger , Poe moved to New York to look for editorial work. Here he completed the writing of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), his only long fiction, a novella-length metaphysical adventure. Unable to find work in New York, Poe moved to Philadelphia and published his first important story, a Platonic romance titled “Ligeia.” In 1839, he joined the editorial staff of Burton’s Gentlemen’s Magazine , in which he published two of his greatest stories, “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “William Wilson.”

In 1840, Poe left the magazine and tried to establish his own literary magazine, which did not meet with success. He did, however, publish a collection of his stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840). He became an editor of Graham’s Magazine , where he published “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” in which...

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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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Comment about this article, ask questions, or add new information about this topic:.

Encyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Humanities

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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This Day In History : January 19

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Edgar Allan Poe is born

On January 19, 1809, poet, author and literary critic Edgar Allan Poe is born in Boston, Massachusetts .

By the time he was three years old, his father had abandoned the family and his mother had died, leaving him in the care of his godfather John Allan, a wealthy tobacco merchant. After attending school in England, Poe entered the University of Virginia in 1826. After fighting with Allan over his heavy gambling debts, he was forced to leave school after only eight months. Poe then served two years in the U.S. Army and won an appointment to West Point. After another falling out, Allan cut him off completely and he got himself dismissed from the academy for rules infractions.

Dark, handsome and brooding, Poe had published three works of poetry by that time, none of which had received much attention. In 1836, while working as an editor at the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, Virginia, Poe married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm. He also completed his first full-length work of fiction, Arthur Gordon Pym , published in 1838.

Poe lost his job at the Messenger due to his heavy drinking, and the couple moved to Philadelphia, where Poe worked as an editor at Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and Graham’s Magazine . He became known for his direct and incisive criticism, as well as for dark horror stories like “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Also around this time, Poe began writing mystery stories, including “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter”—works that would earn him a reputation as the father of the modern detective story.

In 1844, the Poes moved to New York City . He scored a spectacular success the following year with his poem “The Raven.” While Poe was working to launch The Broadway Journal—which soon failed—his wife Virginia fell ill and died of tuberculosis in early 1847. His wife’s death drove Poe even deeper into alcoholism and drug abuse. After becoming involved with several women, Poe returned to Richmond in 1849 and got engaged to an old flame. Before the wedding, however, Poe died suddenly. Though circumstances are somewhat unclear, it appeared he began drinking at a party in Baltimore and disappeared, only to be found incoherent in a gutter three days later. Taken to the hospital, he died on October 7, 1849, at age 40.

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Why Edgar Allan Poe’s Death Remains a Mystery

More than a century and a half after his untimely demise, there are still rumors and legends about how the master of macabre met his end.

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Edgar Allan Poe was one of the first great American-born authors, a master of macabre and mystery whose name alone evokes an eerie chill. His works continue to inspire present-day horror tales, such as the popular Netflix series The Fall of the House of Usher that’s loosely based on the author’s short story of the same name.

Tragically but fittingly, Poe’s death on October 7, 1849, in Baltimore remains cloaked in mystery as well. According to the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia, there are at least 26 published theories regarding his demise. There are also myriad legends and rumors that each seem more ghastly than the next.

Poe was missing for a week before his death

Much of what we think of Poe is actually at least somewhat fabricated. Several people had agendas that used Poe to either advance their own causes or simply taint the author’s name. Amongst the most pernicious was that of a man named Rufus Wilmot Griswold , a rival who was the executor of his literary estate and a major figure in the mystery that surrounds Poe’s death all these years later.

Things were looking up for Poe in October 1849. He was a star author who commanded great audiences for his readings, and he was about to marry his first love, Elmira Royster Shelton, following a short trip from Richmond to Philadelphia and then New York. Poe got as far as Baltimore before suddenly going off the grid, disappearing for nearly a week before turning up on October 3 in what was said to be a delirious state outside a tavern known as Gunner’s Hall.

Poe was first found by a man named Joseph Walker, who recognized the famed author, deduced that he shouldn’t be dressed in someone else’s threadbare, ill-fitting clothing or convulsing in a gutter and offered to help. Walker asked Poe if he knew anyone nearby that he could contact and Poe mentioned an editor named Joseph Snodgrass. Walker wrote Snodgrass a letter urging his assistance. It read as follows:

“Dear Sir, There is a gentleman, rather the worse for wear, at Ryan’s 4th ward polls, who goes under the cognomen of Edgar A. Poe, and who appears in great distress, & he says he is acquainted with you, and I assure you, he is in need of immediate assistance. Yours, in haste, JOS. W. WALKER To Dr. J.E. Snodgrass.”

From there, Poe was taken to Washington College Hospital, at which point things got murky both for the patient and the history books. Poe was kept alone in a windowless room with only one attendant physician, Dr. John Moran, to watch over him through what would be his final days. The week that he spent missing, the hysterical and haggard condition in which he was found, and the unreliability of the witnesses to his final moments and keepers of his legacy all contribute to over a century and a half of speculation and uncertainty.

Poe died on October 7 at age 40, supposedly after uttering the last words “Lord, help my poor soul.” Theories about Poe’s death began cropping up almost immediately after it was announced.

There are no records remaining about his last hospitalization, but Poe was listed as succumbing to phrenitis, or congestion of the brain—a polite term often used for alcohol or drug overdoses at the time. There is suspicion around that cause of death, both due to the era’s less-than-precise medical treatment as well as the motivations of people involved.

Character assassination shaped Poe’s reputation following his death

Poe was, by many accounts, a lightweight when it came to liquor. People who knew him didn’t recall him as a heavy drinker —it seemed that he would go long stretches without taking a sip—but when he did imbibe, it didn’t take much for him to fall into a stupor. The death of his wife, Virginia, from tuberculosis in 1847 did send him into a long spiral, but he eventually recovered. After experiencing some close-calls and receiving advice from a doctor, Poe pledged his sobriety and joined the Sons of Temperance just a few months before his death.

Snodgrass was a major advocate of the temperance movement and toured the country using Poe as an example of the dangers of booze; Snodgrass wrote that when he found Poe at the bar in Baltimore, the author was “utterly stupified with liquor” and could only produce “mere incoherent mutterings” in place of actual speech. Further, Griswold, who had an up-and-down relationship with Poe, used his position as the executor of his estate to write a libelous and, unfortunately, authorized biography that suggested the legendary author was an opium addict and drunkard.

Moran, the Baltimore doctor who cared for Poe, saw this campaign in motion and did his best to clarify the circumstances surrounding Poe’s death. He said that Poe was in no way drunk when he showed up at the bar, and decades later, he wrote a book titled Edgar Allan Poe: A Defense , which described a sober, steady Poe reciting poetry on his deathbed.

There are plenty of other theories about Poe’s death

So if Poe didn’t succumb to the bottle, what did kill him? Again, we’ll never know—there was no autopsy performed to go back and review, and no contemporary accounts remain. But there have been theories for nearly as long as Poe has been dead, some of them more credible than others.

Some have speculated that Poe, who adored cats and had one as a pet, died of rabies. The symptoms seemed to match his delirious fits and the pattern of his decline in the hospital. In 1996, a researcher and professor at the University of Maryland Medical Center named Dr. R. Michael Benitez earned national attention for this theory, which was worked out for a medical conference.

It was, in part, based on Moran’s accounts of Poe’s time in the hospital, which indicated that Poe’s madness had ebbs and flows, with periods of lucidity in between spikes in feverish mania. Moran also noted that Poe was reluctant to drink water, which Benitez said also matched up with symptoms of rabies.

Still, Moran was something of an unreliable narrator, as comparisons of his various accounts reveal quite a few inconsistencies, partly because he wrote them so many years later. If the reality of what happened differed from what Benitez read, rabies might be another false theory.

In could have been a case of the flu that advanced into pneumonia. Before his fateful, tragedy-shortened trip, the author did visit the doctor complaining of an illness.

“His last night in town, he was very sick, and his [soon-to-be] wife noted that he had a weak pulse, a fever, and she didn’t think he should take the journey to Philadelphia,” Chris Semtner, the curator of the Poe Museum in Richmond, told Smithsonian Magazine . “He visited a doctor, and the doctor also told him not to travel, that he was too sick.”

Other theories include carbon monoxide or heavy metal poisoning, though both have largely been discounted. And then there is also the theory that he was beaten into a slow death, though that sounds like something out of a Poe story more than reality.

A voter fraud scheme could be to blame

In his 2023 book A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe , author Mark Dawidziak surmises that Poe suffered from tuberculosis meningitis, which causes swelling in membranes around the brain. There was an explosion in tuberculosis cases in the United States at the time, and his symptoms, like fever and delusions, also match the disease.

A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe

However, there’s another unexpected element to Dawidziak’s theory: An election-rigging scheme known as “cooping” might have exacerbated Poe’s illness and contributed to his death. This tactic involved kidnapping a man off the street, confining and potentially drugging him, then releasing him to repeatedly vote for a preferred candidate.

After all, Poe was found on October 3, an election day for Marylanders to choose their Congressional representatives. One of the polling places was none other than Gunner’s Hall. Perhaps his odd clothing was part of a scheme to disguise his identity, The Washington Post reported .

“This was cold, damp early October in Baltimore,” Dawidziak told the newspaper. “If something was physically wrong with Poe, being cooped—kept in chilly and spartan conditions—could have been disastrous for his system. Add any amount of alcohol to the mix, and the effects would have been devastating.”

Examining Poe’s remains—specifically, his skull—for signs of markings caused by meningitis could potentially give credence to the physiological aspects of Dawidziak’s theory. But, for now, the hypothesis is just one of many in a mystery that continues to bewilder admirers of the literary great.

Tyler Piccotti first joined the Biography.com staff as an Associate News Editor in February 2023, and before that worked almost eight years as a newspaper reporter and copy editor. He is a graduate of Syracuse University. When he's not writing and researching his next story, you can find him at the nearest amusement park, catching the latest movie, or cheering on his favorite sports teams.

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Edgar Allan Poe: The Mystery of Edgar Allan Poe

• Episode aired Oct 27, 1994

Descend into the dark world and tragic life of the melancholy author who is the uncontested master of the macabre, and hear excerpts from his famous works. Descend into the dark world and tragic life of the melancholy author who is the uncontested master of the macabre, and hear excerpts from his famous works. Descend into the dark world and tragic life of the melancholy author who is the uncontested master of the macabre, and hear excerpts from his famous works.

• Paul Clemens
• Norman George
• Peter Graves
• 1 User review

• Edgar Allan Poe

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• Aug 15, 2015
• October 27, 1994 (United States)
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Filming has finally begun for Mike Flanagan's The Fall of the House of Usher, an upcoming limited series from Netflix that pairs up two of America's greatest masters of horror: Mike Flanagan and Edgar Allan Poe. Though a premiere date has yet to be announced, horror enthusiasts are already gearing up for the show that will adapt several as-of-yet unnamed pieces from Poe's diverse bibliography.

Adaptations of Poe's work are rare, likely since many of his stories are short, self-contained, and feature little dialogue. But Flanagan has long proven his mastery of the macabre with his innovative interpretations of works by Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, and others, making this upcoming series one of the most highly-anticipated of 2022.

The Haunting Of Bly Manor (2020)

Stream on netflix.

Flanagan's   sophomore series for Netflix is based on The Turning of the Screw  and other works by Henry James. In an interview Flanagan did for TheWrap , The Fall of the House of Usher will be much faster-paced and explosive than his slow-building Haunting anthology, but this series owes much to Poe.

Related: Every Mike Flanagan Movie & TV Show So Far, Ranked By Metacritic  

While literal ghosts and hauntings are mainly absent from Poe's writing, his protagonists often battle inner demons and feel the spiritual presence of deceased loved ones. The characters in The Haunting of Bly Manor  are similarly haunted by their pasts - and Flanagan's take on ghosts is unique and profound.

Black Mirror (2011 - 2019)

This anthology series isn't just beloved for its science fiction elements - there's plenty of horror throughout its 22 episodes. Common themes and motifs in both Black Mirror and Poe's work include obsession, madness, body horror, revenge, torture, and mankind's impulse to destroy.

The best episodes of Black Mirror  feature tightly-paced narratives in which the characters are forced into situations that test their mental fortitude, something shared with Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Fall of the House of Usher," and "The Masque of the Red Death."

The Simpsons (1989 - )

Stream on disney+.

The iconic, long-running cartoon might seem like a strange choice - but no other show on television has so deftly satirized  and paid homage to Poe's work. The writers have inserted references to the master of horror several times over the decades, but it is T he Simpsons ' first Treehouse of Horror episode  that really stands out.

The third segment of the episode simultaneously parodies and honors Poe's most famous work, "The Raven." The animation's sharp angles and shadows match the poem's sinister, sorrowful tone, and asking James Earl Jones to narrate was a stroke of genius; his mastery of language and powerful voice add gravitas to what could have easily been a cheap joke.

Twin Peaks (1990 - 1991)

Stream on paramount+.

Beneath its humorous, quirky facade, David Lynch's surrealist, psychological thriller explores obsession, madness, and most importantly, the dark underbelly of suburbia. It looks at mankind's most sadistic and violent urges without giving its viewers an easy "why."

The reasoning behind the cold-blooded murder in "The Tell-Tale Heart" is the narrator's revulsion toward his employer's cataract. In "The Cask Of Amontillado," an insult is punishable by death. This tradition of making criminals' motives weird and ambiguous is not just present in Twin Peaks  -  it   has become a popular trope in many modern horror movies and shows.

American Horror Story (2011 - )

Stream on hulu.

Though anthology series American Horror Story may have lost its touch in recent years, its early seasons were provocative, thrilling, and heightened explorations of mankind's capacity for terrible acts.

Related: 10 Creepiest Horror TV Shows So Far In 2022, According To Ranker  

The show's first season, Murder House , combined weird horror with body horror and gave both a supernatural twist. But it is the show's desire to shock its audience that directly correlates to Poe's disturbing tales. And even if later seasons were lacking in certain aspects, the production design of the series has always been just as visceral and grim as Poe's detailed descriptions of his gloomy settings.

The Frankenstein Chronicles (2015 - 2017)

Not currently available to stream in the u.s..

Based upon Mary Shelley's psychological thriller, this horror show set in 19th-century London gave  Sean Bean one of his best roles . He plays a detective who searches for answers after discovering a corpse amalgamated of many different human bodies.

Besides the grotesque body horror and Gothic vibes, The Frankenstein Chronicles features many characters who are outsiders and social outcasts. Poe was not interested in the mundane; his extreme characters were often outsiders who did not adhere to society's rules and expectations, such as the narrators of "The Cask of Amontillado" and "The Black Cat."

The Following (2013 - 2015)

Stream on amc+.

This short-lived series created by Scream's Kevin Williamson stars Kevin Bacon as a former FBI agent brought back to the agency to help investigate, then recapture an escaped serial killer who has gathered a cult following.

The show directly references Poe's work, with the serial killer persuading members of his cult (similar to the Manson Family) to commit murders that echo events in his short stories. The writing is riddled with direct quotes from Poe's poetry and stories, but it is The Following's determination to make its viewers squirm that makes it the most Poe-esque.

The Haunting Of Hill House (2018)

Stream on hbo max.

Flanagan's first series for Netflix is arguably his scariest. The slow-building horror based on Shirley Jackson's novel has great jump scares, skin-crawling sequences, and, like Bly Manor , Flanagan's unique interpretation of ghosts. The show is heightened and atmospheric, key qualities in all of Poe's works.

Related: All Of Mike Flanagan's Horror Scores, Ranked  

The epic, horrifying climax that reveals what really happened to the twins and the children's mother, Olivia, is a scenario that could have come straight from a Poe story. And similarly to the family's frantic escape from the house, the narrator of "Usher" flees from the manor right before it crumbles into the earth.

Penny Dreadful (2014 - 2016)

Stream on fubotv.

This Gothic horror series directly borrows characters and storylines created by Poe's European contemporaries, writers he greatly admired. Social outcasts are common in his writing, likely since the orphan and struggling poet was one himself for much of his life.  Penny Dreadful's  main characters are ambiguous outsiders plagued with guilt who live outside society's purview.

The production design of the show gives the viewer a real sense of place, just as Poe did with his lush and comprehensive scenic descriptions. And though he was primarily focused on the terrible acts humans were capable of, there is certainly a supernatural element to his work.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955 - 1962)

Stream on peacock.

Edgar Allan Poe didn't just horrify his readers - he's often credited with writing the first detective story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," whose lead character will feature in  Usher . Poe's artistic descendant Alfred Hitchcock created this anthology series that similarly bends genres, infusing its episodes with drama, suspense, and mystery.

It is the episode "Lamb to the Slaughter," based upon a short story by Roald Dahl, that is most evocative of Poe's style. Mary Maloney's dark journey is a shocking, twisted, and exciting revenge tale - and it's also humorous, a quality of Poe's often ignored. She's akin to the narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart," but without all that troublesome guilt.

Next: 10 Poe Stories Mike Flanagan Could Include In The Fall Of The House Of Usher

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Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘For Annie’ Heads to Auction

L ike so many others, Edgar Allan Poe moved to New York City for the promise of work. “He was a great New Yorker,” says Richard Austin, Global Head of Books and Manuscripts at Sotheby’s. “The number of addresses he lived at during this time is like how so many of us move around to different neighborhoods.”

It’s easy to imagine the author walking through the modern streets of Greenwich Village, which was already a bustling urban area during Poe’s time in the 1840s. Even then, the city was inspiring to artists. It there that he wrote some of his most famous works, like “The Raven” and “The Cask of Amontillado.” As he wrote of New York in a letter in 1844, “The city is brimfull [sic] of all kinds of legitimate liveliness – the life of money-making, and the life of pleasure.” But Poe also predicted the city’s growth and spread as he looked at the cliffs and trees near what is now Roosevelt Island, writing, “In twenty years, or thirty at farthest, we shall see here nothing more romantic than shipping, warehouses, and wharves.” He was right about the development but wrong, perhaps, about the lack of romance in it.

“The city is brimfull of all kinds of legitimate liveliness – the life of money-making, and the life of pleasure.”

When Poe moved to a small cottage in what is now The Bronx, he did so in the hopes of helping cure his wife Virginia of tuberculosis. Today the cottage has been preserved as a museum with a small front yard but the city has grown all around it with bodegas and high-rise buildings. In Poe’s time, he could look out from his porch and see farmland all around him. “It’s a window into New York’s past,” Austin says, and Poe’s as well.

Poe’s final and most difficult years were spent in this Bronx cottage. He, Virginia and his mother-in-law moved to the cottage in 1846. During this time, Poe was a struggling writer living in relative poverty. Peter Ackroyd wrote in his biography Poe: A Life Cut Short that Poe’s mother-in-law foraged greens along the country roads and even dug up turnips meant for cattle to keep everyone fed. Despite moving to this place outside the city, Poe’s wife died a year later.

This tumultuous time in Poe’s biography was an important period artistically. “His work was so much impacted by his life circumstances,” says Austin. “He’d be inspired by a woman he met or in the depths of despair, and he would write.” Poe wrote “The Bells,” “Annabel Lee,” “Ulalume” and the poem “ For Annie ” while living in the cottage. The titular bells of his poem are thought by some to be inspired by the tolling of the Fordham University church’s bells which were located near his home. “Annabel Lee,” about a couple so in love that the woman is killed out of spite, is a poem of grief, written after Virginia’s death. Austin noted that even among Poe’s notably gloomy oeuvre there is a particular focus on death in his work he produced in these last years.

Some of his final works were written both for publication and as a literary bouquet of roses. He sent them to women he courted after his wife’s death, most obviously “For Annie,” which was written for Nancy “Annie” L. Richmond. He sent her a copy of the poem after he’d sold it for publication, telling her he thought it was among his best works but might be mistaken, “so I wish to know what my Annie truly thinks of them.” On 26 June 2024, an autograph manuscript of the poem from the Library of Dr. Rodney P. Swantko is being auctioned by Sotheby’s for the first time since 2009.

Writing “For Annie” may have been a somewhat calculated move, Austin says. “Like many New Yorkers, he’s thinking of his next step.” Poe’s financial situation was particularly dire in his last years and he was likely aware that he needed another patron or relationship to support him. Poe is not thought of as a particularly autobiographical writer, but it’s clear that his life – and the places he lived – had a great influence on his work.

Perhaps it’s for this reason that so many cities have sought to claim him as their own. There are Edgar Allan Poe museums in Richmond, Baltimore and Philadelphia, as well as the one in New York City. But when he died under mysterious circumstances on a trip to Baltimore in 1849, home was still the cottage in The Bronx.

The city has changed as Poe predicted it would, but modern Poe aficionados could learn a lot about the writer by visiting the places where he lived and imagining themselves into New York City as it existed in the 1840s. The city has grown, the farmlands have been pushed even farther out, but it’s still the urban heart of the United States where so many talented artists have come, dreaming of creating work that is appreciated long after they are gone.

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