Edgar Allan Poe

• 1. Introduction

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  Edgar Allan Poe was found semiconscious on the streets of Baltimore on the 3rd of October, 1849, wearing clothes that were not his own. He could not explain himself. Four days later, at five in the morning on a Sunday, he was dead. He was 40 years old. His last coherent utterance, according to his attending physician, was "Lord help my poor soul."

  The man who died that morning had spent his life inventing things that did not yet exist. He wrote the first detective fiction in American literature. He pioneered the short story as a literary form. He sketched a cosmological theory that would not be confirmed by science for more than eight decades. He did all of this while perpetually broke, frequently estranged from the one man who could have helped him, and haunted by the deaths of nearly every woman he loved.

  How did a boy born to two traveling actors in Boston in 1809 become the architect of so much that the world now takes for granted? What drove him to write horror, hoaxes, satire, and poetry with equal ferocity? And why, in the days after his death, did his own literary executor try to erase him?

• 2. Orphan and Outsider

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  David Poe Jr. abandoned his family in 1810, when Edgar was barely a year old. His mother, Eliza, died the following year from pulmonary tuberculosis, leaving three small children. Edgar's grandfather, David Poe, had emigrated from County Cavan, Ireland, around 1750, meaning Edgar was only a generation removed from immigrant hardship.

  John Allan, a Richmond merchant who dealt in cloth, wheat, tombstones, tobacco, and slaves, took the two-year-old into his home without ever formally adopting him. The Allan family had Edgar baptized into the Episcopal Church in 1812. They took him to Scotland, where Allan had been born, and then to London, where he studied at a boarding school in Chelsea before attending the Reverend John Bransby's Manor House School in Stoke Newington, then a village about four miles north of the city.

  Back in Richmond by 1820, Poe moved through a childhood shaped by Allan's alternating indulgence and harsh discipline. In 1824, he served as a lieutenant in the Richmond youth honor guard when the city celebrated the Marquis de Lafayette's visit. The following year, Allan's uncle William Galt died and left an inheritance estimated at $750,000, prompting Allan to purchase a two-story brick house called Moldavia. The wealth surrounding Poe was never his.

  At the University of Virginia in 1826, where Jefferson had designed a system of student self-government meant to cultivate independence, Poe instead accumulated gambling debts and grew estranged from both Royster, the girl he may have been engaged to, and from Allan, who refused to cover what Poe insisted were necessary expenses. When Poe discovered that Royster had married a man named Alexander Shelton, he left for Boston under the pseudonym Henri Le Rennet.

• 3. The Soldier Who Wrote Poems

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  On the 27th of May, 1827, Poe enlisted in the United States Army as a private under the name Edgar A. Perry, claiming he was 22 when he was actually 18. His first posting was Fort Independence in Boston Harbor, where he earned five dollars a month.

  That same year he published his first book, a 40-page collection titled Tamerlane and Other Poems, credited only to "A Bostonian." Fifty copies were printed. It received virtually no attention. In later years, only twelve copies were believed to have survived. In December 2009, one sold at Christie's in New York City for $662,500, a record price for a work of American literature.

  Poe's regiment was posted to Fort Moultrie in Charleston, South Carolina. He was promoted to artificer, a tradesman's rank that doubled his pay. He eventually attained the rank of sergeant major for artillery, the highest non-commissioned rank available. He then began negotiating his exit, revealing his true identity to Lieutenant Howard, who agreed to an honorable discharge if Poe reconciled with Allan.

  Allan ignored Poe's letters for months. Frances Allan died on the 28th of February, 1829, and Poe arrived the day after her burial. Perhaps softened by grief, Allan agreed to support Poe's application to West Point. Before enrolling, Poe stayed in Baltimore with his aunt Maria Clemm, her daughter Virginia, his brother Henry, and his invalid grandmother. There, the critic John Neal published a review of Poe's poetry that Poe later described as "the very first words of encouragement I ever remember to have heard." Poe dedicated a poem to Neal in his second collection, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems, published in Baltimore in 1829.

  At West Point, Allan's remarriage to Louisa Patterson in October 1830 and bitter quarrels over Allan's children from extramarital affairs ended whatever remained of their relationship. Poe deliberately got himself court-martialed on the 8th of February, 1831, for refusing to attend formations, classes, and church. He pleaded not guilty to hasten his dismissal. His fellow cadets, many of whom had donated as much as 75 cents apiece toward his third book, may have expected the satirical verses about commanding officers he had written before. The total raised was approximately $170. The volume, simply titled Poems, was printed by Elam Bliss of New York and dedicated to the U.S. Corps of Cadets.

• 4. The Journalist's Life

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  Poe's elder brother Henry died on the 1st of August, 1831, in part due to complications from alcoholism. The loss did not slow Poe's attempts to earn a living as a writer, though those attempts were initially frustrated by conditions outside his control. American publishers routinely sold unauthorized copies of British works rather than pay American authors, regardless of merit. The Panic of 1837 further suppressed what modest market existed.

  In October 1833, the Baltimore Saturday Visiter awarded him a prize for the short story "MS. Found in a Bottle." The prize brought him to the attention of John P. Kennedy, a well-connected Baltimorean who introduced Poe to Thomas W. White, editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond. Poe became assistant editor there in 1835, though White fired him within weeks for reportedly being drunk on the job.

  Poe obtained a license to marry his cousin Virginia on the 22nd of September, 1835. He was 26; she was 13. He was reinstated at the Messenger after promising to reform. During his tenure he claimed the paper's circulation grew from 700 to 3,500. The official wedding took place on the 16th of May, 1836, at a Richmond boarding house, with a witness falsely attesting Virginia's age as 21.

  In Philadelphia, where Poe lived at five different residences between 1838 and 1844, he found steadier footing. He became assistant editor at Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in the summer of 1839. His only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, was published in 1838 and widely reviewed. The collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque appeared the same year. In June 1840, he published a prospectus for a journal he intended to call The Penn, advertising it in the Saturday Evening Post as "a Monthly Literary journal to be edited and published in the city of Philadelphia by Edgar A. Poe." The journal was later renamed The Stylus. He never managed to produce it.

  At Graham's Magazine, where he served as co-editor, Poe witnessed what an editorial note in the magazine's last 1841 number described as success that was "unexampled, almost incredible." In January 1842, Virginia showed the first signs of tuberculosis while singing at the piano, rupturing a blood vessel in her throat. She would linger for five more years. Poe later moved to New York, briefly worked at the Evening Mirror, then became editor and eventually owner of the Broadway Journal. There he publicly accused Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of plagiarism, a charge that drew responses from Longfellow's defenders in what was later called "The Longfellow War." Longfellow himself never replied.

• 5. The Raven and Its Price

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  On the 29th of January, 1845, "The Raven" appeared in the Evening Mirror. It was simultaneously published in The American Review: A Whig Journal under the pseudonym "Quarles." Poe was paid $9 for it. The poem made him a household name almost overnight.

  The Broadway Journal failed the following year. Poe moved with Virginia to a cottage in Fordham in the Bronx, which has since been relocated to a park near the southeast corner of the Grand Concourse and Kingsbridge Road. He befriended the Jesuits at nearby St. John's College, now Fordham University. Virginia died in the cottage on the 30th of January, 1847.

  Poe's attempts to court the poet Sarah Helen Whitman of Providence, Rhode Island, after Virginia's death came to nothing, apparently undone by his drinking and by the intervention of Whitman's mother. He returned to Richmond and resumed contact with his childhood sweetheart Sarah Elmira Royster. He was planning a return to New York when, on the 3rd of October, 1849, he was found insensible on a Baltimore street.

  On the night before he died, Poe repeatedly called out a name: "Reynolds." No one has ever established to whom he was referring. Newspapers reported the cause of death as "congestion of the brain" or "cerebral inflammation," phrases commonly used at the time to describe deaths attributed to disreputable causes. All medical records, including the death certificate itself, have been lost. Speculation over the actual cause has ranged from delirium tremens and epilepsy to syphilis, rabies, and carbon monoxide poisoning. A theory first advanced in 1872 holds that Poe may have been a victim of cooping, an electoral fraud scheme in which men were forced to vote repeatedly for a particular candidate, sometimes at the cost of their lives.

• 6. Griswold's War on the Dead

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  Rufus Wilmot Griswold published his obituary for Poe in the New York Tribune on the very day Poe was buried. He signed it "Ludwig." The opening sentences read: "Edgar Allan Poe is dead. He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it."

  Griswold had harbored a grudge against Poe since 1842. He somehow secured the role of Poe's literary executor and used it to commission a biographical piece, "Memoir of the Author," included in an 1850 collection of Poe's works. The memoir depicted Poe as a drug-addicted, drunken madman and included letters as documentary evidence. Those letters were later revealed to be forgeries. Scholars found little or no evidence that Poe was addicted to drugs at all.

  John Neal, the same critic who had given Poe his first encouragement decades earlier, published a rebuttal attacking Griswold as a "Rhadamanthus, who is not to be bilked of his fee, a thimble-full of newspaper notoriety." Others who knew Poe personally also denounced the book. It did not matter. Because Griswold's memoir was the only full biography available and was widely reprinted, it became the dominant source on Poe's life. Readers who might have been skeptical were drawn in by the prospect of consuming the work of an "evil" man.

  The fabricated portrait shaped Poe's popular image for generations. It also, in a way Griswold likely did not intend, cemented Poe's romantic mythology as a tormented genius. Fictional depictions of Poe, including novels like Matthew Pearl's The Poe Shadow, have continued to blend the man with his characters, treating the mystery around him as an extension of the mysteries he wrote.

• 7. What He Built

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  During his lifetime, Poe was known primarily as a critic. The contemporary critic James Russell Lowell called him "the most discriminating, philosophical, and fearless critic upon imaginative works who has written in America," adding, with dry humor, that he occasionally seemed to use prussic acid instead of ink. Poe's harsh reviews earned him the nickname "tomahawk man." He correctly predicted that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's reputation would decline, writing: "We grant him high qualities, but deny him the Future."

  His detective tales featuring C. Auguste Dupin were few in number but long in consequence. Arthur Conan Doyle said: "Each of Poe's detective stories is a root from which a whole literature has developed.... Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?" Jules Verne wrote a sequel to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, titled An Antarctic Mystery. H. G. Wells reflected that the novel showed "what a very intelligent mind could imagine about the south polar region a century ago." In 2013, The Guardian named Pym one of the greatest novels ever written in English, citing its influence on Doyle, Henry James, B. Traven, and David Morrell.

  H. P. Lovecraft described Poe as his "God of Fiction" and dedicated an entire section of his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature" to Poe's influence. Alfred Hitchcock once credited his interest in suspense films directly to Poe's stories. The Japanese author Taro Hirai derived his pen name, Edogawa Ranpo, from an altered phonetic rendering of Poe's name. In France, Charles Baudelaire's translations became the definitive Continental renditions of Poe's work.

  Poe's 1848 prose essay Eureka proposed a cosmological theory anticipating the Big Bang by roughly 80 years and offered the first plausible resolution to Olbers' paradox. He considered it his masterpiece. His cryptography essays, particularly "The Gold-Bug" and "A Few Words on Secret Writing," published in July 1841 in Graham's Magazine, sparked a national enthusiasm for ciphers. Two ciphers he published under the name W. B. Tyler in 1841 remained unsolved until 1992 and 2000 respectively. William Friedman, regarded as America's foremost cryptologist, traced his entire career to reading "The Gold-Bug" as a child. That interest eventually led Friedman to crack Japan's PURPLE code during World War II.

  The Mystery Writers of America named their annual award for distinguished mystery writing "The Edgars." Every year, the prize carries his name forward.