Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was an American poet, critic and short-story writer, famous for The Raven, The Fall of the House of Usher and The Tell-Tale Heart. He perfected the tale of terror, invented the detective story with The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and influenced generations of writers, from Baudelaire, who translated him into French, to Arthur Conan Doyle and the authors of horror and science fiction.
Genres
poetry, novels and stories
Works
The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven and Other Poems, A Dream Within a Dream, Annabel Lee, The Bells
An orphan in Richmond
Edgar Poe was born in Boston on 19 January 1809, the son of two travelling actors. His father abandoned the family, and his mother died of tuberculosis in Richmond, Virginia, in 1811, when he was two. He was taken in by John Allan, a Scottish tobacco merchant, and his wife Frances, who raised him without ever formally adopting him; he later used their name as his middle name.
The boy spent five years at school in England with the Allans, then studied at the new University of Virginia in 1826, where he ran up gambling debts that Allan refused to pay. After a bitter quarrel he left for Boston, published a first book of poems at his own expense in 1827, and enlisted in the US Army under a false name. He later spent a few months at West Point before getting himself dismissed.
Living by the pen
Poe tried to make a living entirely from writing, at a time when American authors were poorly paid. He worked as an editor and critic for magazines in Richmond, Philadelphia and New York, raising their circulation with his reviews, which were so harsh that he was nicknamed the 'tomahawk man'. In 1836 he married his cousin Virginia Clemm, who was thirteen.
In these years he wrote his greatest tales: The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), The Masque of the Red Death, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat. In The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) the amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin solves a crime by pure reasoning, inventing a genre that Conan Doyle would make world-famous.
The Raven
The Raven, published in January 1845, made Poe famous almost overnight. The poem was reprinted in newspapers across the country, parodied and recited in public. In an essay, The Philosophy of Composition, Poe claimed to have constructed it step by step, like a mathematical problem, starting from the effect he wanted to produce; many readers doubt that it was so calculated.
Fame did not bring money: Poe was paid only a few dollars for the poem. Virginia had fallen ill with tuberculosis in 1842, and she died in January 1847 in a cottage at Fordham, then a village north of New York. Poe was devastated. He continued to write and lecture, and published Eureka, a prose poem about the universe, in 1848.
A mysterious death
On 3 October 1849 Poe was found in a Baltimore street, delirious and wearing clothes that were not his own. He died four days later, on 7 October, without being able to explain what had happened. Alcohol, illness and political violence have all been suggested; the cause of his death remains unknown.
His literary executor, Rufus Griswold, a rival, wrote a malicious obituary portraying him as a madman and a drunkard, and this image long shaped his reputation. In France, Charles Baudelaire translated his tales and championed him as a great artist, and Stéphane Mallarmé translated his poems. Today he is seen as one of the founders of American literature.
Anecdotes
The Raven's real model
Poe reviewed Charles Dickens's novel Barnaby Rudge in 1841 and 1842, and regretted that the author had not made more of Grip, the talking raven that accompanies the hero. Dickens had based Grip on his own pet raven. Many critics believe that this bird gave Poe the idea of a raven that speaks, in the poem he published four years later.
The Baltimore visitor
From 1949, every year on the night of Poe's birthday, a mysterious visitor dressed in black, his face hidden by a hat and scarf, left three roses and a half-bottle of cognac on Poe's grave in Baltimore. The tradition went on for some sixty years and was never explained. The visits stopped after 2009, the bicentenary of the writer's birth.
A football team
Poe lived and died in Baltimore, and the city has never forgotten him. When its American football team needed a name in 1996, fans voted to call it the Baltimore Ravens, after his most famous poem.
Frequently asked questions
What did Edgar Allan Poe write?
Poems such as The Raven, Annabel Lee and The Bells; tales of terror such as The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-Tale Heart and The Masque of the Red Death; and detective stories such as The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Purloined Letter. His only complete novel is The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.
Did Poe invent the detective story?
He is generally credited with it. The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) introduced the amateur detective who solves a mystery by reasoning, his admiring friend who tells the story, and the locked room, all of which reappear in the Sherlock Holmes stories.
How did Edgar Allan Poe die?
Nobody knows. He was found in a confused state in Baltimore on 3 October 1849 and died on 7 October. His medical records and death certificate have been lost.
Why is Poe so famous in France?
Charles Baudelaire discovered his tales around 1847, saw in him a kindred spirit and spent years translating them; his translations are classics of French literature in their own right.