Edgar Allan Poe
American author, poet, editor and literary critic
1809 CE to 1849 CE
Edgar Allan Poe (born Edgar Poe; January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) is an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement.
Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe is one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre.
He is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction.
He is the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.
Born as Edgar Poe in Boston, Massachusetts; he is orphaned young when his mother dies shortly after his father abandons the family.
Poe is taken in by John and Frances Allan, of Richmond, Virginia, but they never formally adopt him.
He attends the University of Virginia for one semester but leaves due to lack of money.
After enlisting in the Army and later failing as an officer's cadet at West Point, Poe parts ways with the Allans.
His publishing career begins humbly, with an anonymous collection of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), credited only to "a Bostonian".
Poe switches his focus to prose and spends the next several years working for literary journals and periodicals, becoming known for his own style of literary criticism.
His work forces him to move among several cities, including Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City.
In Baltimore in 1835, he marries Virginia Clemm, his 13-year-old cousin.
In January 1845, Poe publishes his poem, "The Raven", to instant success.
His wife dies of tuberculosis two years after its publication.
He begins planning to produce his own journal, The Penn (later renamed The Stylus), though he dies before it can be produced.
On October 7, 1849, at age 40, Poe dies in Baltimore; the cause of his death is unknown and has been variously attributed to alcohol, brain congestion, cholera, drugs, heart disease, rabies, suicide, tuberculosis, and other agents.
Poe and his works influence literature in the United States and around the world, as well as in specialized fields, such as cosmology and cryptography.
Poe and his work appear throughout popular culture in literature, music, films, and television.
A number of his homes are dedicated museums today.
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Edgar Allen Poe, after arranging to be dismissed from West Point in 1831 when it becomes apparent that his foster father will not contribute to his support, finds himself disinherited and destitute at twenty-two.
His 1831 collection, Poems by Edgar A. Poe...Second Edition, follows Tamerlane and other Poems (1827) and Al Aaraaf, Tamerlan, and Minor Poems (1829).
Poe had traveled to West Point and matriculated as a cadet on July 1, 1830.
In October 1830, John Allan married his second wife Louisa Patterson.
The marriage and bitter quarrels with Poe over the children born to Allan out of affairs had led to the foster father finally disowning Poe.
Poe had decided to leave West Point by purposely getting court-martialed.
On February 8, 1831, he was tried for gross neglect of duty and disobedience of orders for refusing to attend formations, classes, or church.
Poe had tactically pleaded not guilty to induce dismissal, knowing that he would be found guilty.
The book was financed with help from his fellow cadets at West Point, many of whom donated seventy-five cents to the cause, raising a total of one hundred and seventy dollars.
They may have been expecting verses similar to the satirical ones that Poe had been writing about commanding officers.
It is printed by Elam Bliss of New York, labeled as "Second Edition," and includes a page saying, "To the U.S. Corps of Cadets this volume is respectfully dedicated".
The book once again reprints the long poems "Tamerlane" and "Al Aaraaf" but also six previously unpublished poems, including early versions of "To Helen", "Israfel", and "The City in the Sea".
He returns to Baltimore to his aunt, brother, and cousin in March 1831.
After his brother's death, Poe had begun more earnest attempts to start his career as a writer.
He has chosen a difficult time in American publishing to do so.
He is the first well-known American to try to live by writing alone and is hampered by the lack of an international copyright law.
Publishers often produce unauthorized copies of British works rather than paying for new work by Americans.
The industry is also particularly hurt by the Panic of 1837.
There is a booming growth in American periodicals around this time period, fueled in part by new technology, but many do not last beyond a few issues and publishers often refuse to pay their writers, or pay them much later than they promise.
Throughout his attempts to live as a writer, Poe repeatedly has to resort to humiliating pleas for money and other assistance.
After his early attempts at poetry, Poe had turned his attention to prose.
He had placed a few stories with a Philadelphia publication and began work on his only drama, Politian.
The Baltimore Saturday Visiter awarded Poe a prize in October 1833 for his short story "MS. Found in a Bottle".
The story had brought him to the attention of John P. Kennedy, a Baltimorean of considerable means.
He had helped Poe place some of his stories, and introduced him to Thomas W. White, editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond.
Poe became assistant editor of the periodical in August 1835, but was discharged within a few weeks for having been caught drunk by his boss.
Returning to Baltimore, Poe had obtained a license to marry his cousin Virginia on September 22, 1835, though it is unknown if they were married at that time.
He was twenty-six and she was thirteen.
Reinstated by White after promising good behavior, Poe had gone back to Richmond with Virginia and her mother.
He had remained at the Messenger until January 1837.
During this period, Poe claims that its circulation increased from seven hundred to thirty-five hundred.
He publishes several poems, book reviews, critiques, and stories in the paper.
On May 16, 1836, he and Virginia Clemm had held a Presbyterian wedding ceremony at their Richmond boarding house, with a witness falsely attesting Clemm's age as twenty-one.
In the summer of 1839, Poe becomes assistant editor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine.
He publishes numerous articles, stories, and reviews, enhancing his reputation as a trenchant critic, which he had established at the Southern Literary Messenger.
Also in 1839, the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque is published in two volumes, though he makes little money from it and it receives mixed reviews.
His short story The Gold-Bug begins serialization in American newspapers on June 21.
Poe had left Burton's Gentlemen's Magazine after about a year and found a position as assistant at Graham's Magazine.
In June 1840, Poe hsd published a prospectus announcing his intentions to start his own journal called The Stylus.
Originally, Poe intended to call the journal The Penn, as it would have been based in Philadelphia.
In the June 6, 1840 issue of Philadelphia's Saturday Evening Post, Poe bought advertising space for his prospectus: "Prospectus of the Penn Magazine, a Monthly Literary journal to be edited and published in the city of Philadelphia by Edgar A. Poe."
The journal will never be produced before Poe's death.
Around this time, he had attempted to secure a position within the Tyler administration, claiming that he was a member of the Whig Party.
He hoped to be appointed to the Custom House in Philadelphia with help from President Tyler's son Robert, an acquaintance of Poe's friend Frederick Thomas.
Poe had failed to show up for a meeting with Thomas to discuss the appointment in mid-September 1842, claiming to have been sick, though Thomas believed that he had been drunk.
Though he was promised an appointment, all positions were filled by others.
One evening in January 1842, Virginia showed the first signs of consumption, now known as tuberculosis, while singing and playing the piano.
Poe had described it as breaking a blood vessel in her throat.
She has only partially recovered.
Poe has begun to drink more heavily under the stress of Virginia's illness.
It is concurrently published on January 29, 1845, in The American Review: A Whig Journal under the pseudonym "Quarles".
Poe had left Graham's Magazine in 1843 and attempted to find a new position, for a time angling for a government post.
He had returned to New York, where he works briefly at the Evening Mirror before becoming editor of the Broadway Journal and, later, sole owner.
Here he will alienate himself from other writers by publicly accusing Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of plagiarism, though Longfellow will never respond.
That home, since relocated to a park near the southeast corner of the Grand Concourse and Kingsbridge Road, is now known as the Poe Cottage.
Nearby he befriended the Jesuits at St. John's College, now Fordham University.
Virginia had died at the cottage on January 30, 1847.
Biographers and critics often suggest that Poe's frequent theme of the "death of a beautiful woman" stems from the repeated loss of women throughout his life, including his wife.
Poe is increasingly unstable after his wife's death.
He attempts to court poet Sarah Helen Whitman, who lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
Their engagement fails, purportedly because of Poe's drinking and erratic behavior.
There is also strong evidence that Whitman's mother intervened and did much to derail their relationship.
Poe now returns to Richmond and resumes a relationship with his childhood sweetheart Sarah Elmira Royster.
He is taken to the Washington Medical College where he dies on Sunday, October 7, 1849, at 5:00 in the morning.
Poe was never coherent long enough to explain how he came to be in his dire condition and, oddly, was wearing clothes that were not his own.
He is said to have repeatedly called out the name "Reynolds" on the night before his death, though it is unclear to whom he was referring. Some sources say that Poe's final words were "Lord help my poor soul".
All medical records have been lost, including his death certificate.
Newspapers at the time report Poe's death as "congestion of the brain" or "cerebral inflammation", common euphemisms for deaths from disreputable causes such as alcoholism.
The actual cause of death remains a mystery.
Speculation has included delirium tremens, heart disease, epilepsy, syphilis, meningeal inflammation, cholera,[76] and rabies.
One theory dating from 1872 suggests that cooping was the cause of Poe's death, a form of electoral fraud in which citizens were forced to vote for a particular candidate, sometimes leading to violence and even murder.