Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was a short-story writer, poet, and critic. The son of itinerant actors, Poe was orphaned at two and was adopted by John Allan, a Richmond, Virginia, merchant and his wife. They gave Poe his middle name and a genteel childhood but eventually became the source of profound unhappiness. Allan was unfaithful to his wife, and when Poe took her part, Allan turned on him savagely. Although Allan violently opposed Poe’s literary career, he unwittingly encouraged it. His firm imported many foreign books and magazines, which Poe read assiduously, giving him a literary sophistication far beyond his Richmond peers. Allan sent Poe to the University of Virginia with no spending money; when the boy ran up heavy gambling debts, his foster father refused to pay. After a bitter quarrel, Poe left home to seek literary fame.

Poe moved to Boston in 1827 where he published a book of poems but almost starved. He enlisted in the army and soon became sergeant major of his regiment. A reconciliation with Allan, motivated largely by Poe’s hope of an inheritance, led to an appointment to West Point. There he began brilliantly, but another falling out with Allan plunged him into depression. He stopped attending classes and drills and was dismissed in 1831. His cadet friends helped finance a book of poems containing some of his best lyrics, “Israfel” and “The Doomed City,” but the book was hardly noticed.

Poe spent the next years living in Baltimore with his aunt, Mrs. Maria Clemm, and her daughter, Virginia. One of his best stories, “A MS. Found in a Bottle,” won him a job on the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond. He proved an able editor, greatly increasing circulation. But he had begun drinking heavily, and he soon parted company with the magazine.

In 1836 he married Virginia Clemm, who was only thirteen, and departed with her and Mrs. Clemm for the North. For the next several years he alternated between editing and writing, publishing both poetry and prose, in particular The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, a tale of shipwreck and picturesque horrors in the South Seas. As literary editor of Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine, which had a large circulation, Poe became a major figure in American letters, making enemies by the score with his trenchant criticism. But alcohol cost him this job, too.

He continued to write, however, producing “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Gold Bug,” and “The Mystery of Marie Roget” in a cool style that was the polar opposite of his romantic poems and horror stories. If he did not invent the detective story with these tales, he perfected it.

In 1842, inspired in part by a talk with Charles Dickens, Poe wrote “The Raven,” his best-known poem. It was an immense success and almost instantly won Poe the fame for which he hungered. But money did not come with it: he still earned as little as four dollars for an article, fifteen dollars for a story. Tormented by poverty, Poe watched his wife die of tuberculosis. He became more and more unstable, drinking and taking opium, at one point attempting suicide with the drug. He published a grandiose prose poem, “Eureka,” which combined half-baked science and dubious cosmogony. Returning to Richmond, he swore off liquor and became engaged to one of his youthful loves, now a rich widow. But a trip to Baltimore led to a fatal drinking bout.

As an editor Poe struggled to raise American literature to the level of his own formidable intelligence and talent. His instability doomed this ambition to failure, but his own artistry somehow survived his impulse for self-destruction. Poe added the concept of professionalism to the role of the writer in America. For him language and its artful use was virtually an end in itself, transcending ideology. —US History Companion