Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe's Backstory

Early life

Edgar Poe was born on January 19, 1809, in Boston, to the traveling actors Eliza and David Poe.¹⁵ His father left the family while he was a baby, and his mother died of tuberculosis in Richmond, Virginia, on December 8, 1811, when he was two.¹ He was taken in by John and Frances Allan of Richmond, who never formally adopted him; he did not take their surname.¹ At 15 he was in a junior honor guard that escorted the Marquis de Lafayette around Richmond.¹

University, army and West Point

At 17 Poe went to the University of Virginia. According to the Poe Museum, he arrived with only $110 for his fees, gambled to make up the rest, ran up about $2,000 in debts, and left after a few months.¹ In Boston he published his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, as “A Bostonian,” and at 18 he enlisted in the army under the name Edgar Perry, rising to sergeant major in two years.¹ He then entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where, the Poe Museum says, he did well in his studies but was court-martialed for “extreme dereliction of duty.”¹ Two more books of poems followed, in 1829 and 1831.²

Baltimore, Richmond and marriage

Poe spent about four years in Baltimore with relatives, among them his aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter Virginia, and turned from poetry to short stories.¹ After the Southern Literary Messenger printed his tales “Metzengerstein” and “Berenice,” its editor, Thomas White, hired him, and Poe moved back to Richmond; the Poe Museum says tensions with White followed, possibly over his drinking.¹ About a year after joining the magazine he married his cousin Virginia; she was 13 and he was 27, and the museum notes that the nature of the marriage is debated.¹ He left the Messenger in 1837.¹

Philadelphia and New York

The years from 1838 in Philadelphia are considered his most productive: stories from that period include “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat.”¹ His only completed novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, appeared in 1838, and Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, in two volumes, in 1840.² He is credited with inventing the detective story; Arthur Conan Doyle later called him “the father of the detective tale.”⁵

“The Raven,” published in early 1845, made him famous; the Poe Museum says he was paid about $15 for it but gained lecturing and recitation work.¹ Tales and The Raven and Other Poems were published in New York the same year.² Virginia died of tuberculosis in New York in 1847, aged 24.¹ His last book, Eureka: A Prose Poem, appeared in 1848.²

Death

In 1849 Poe went south to Richmond and became engaged to Elmira Royster Shelton, by then a widow, who had been his fiancée when he went to university.¹ He left Richmond by ship for Baltimore on September 27, and his movements are not recorded again until October 3, when he was found delirious at Gunner’s Hall, a Baltimore tavern that was serving as a polling place, wearing someone else’s clothes.¹³ He died at Washington College Hospital on October 7, 1849, aged 40.³ His doctor recorded delirium tremens, a local paper “congestion of the brain”; there was no autopsy, no death certificate survives, and the cause has never been established.³

Reputation

After his death his rival Rufus Griswold, who became his literary executor, published a biography portraying him as a drunkard and opium addict; Biography.com calls it “libelous,” and National Geographic reports there is no evidence Poe used opium.⁴³ Poe’s stories and poems have been adapted for film and television many times, from Roger Corman’s eight Poe films of the early 1960s to Mike Flanagan’s 2023 Netflix series.⁸⁷