Edgar Allan Poe Biography

One the greatest and unhappiest of American poets, a master of the horror tale, patron saint to the practitioners of the detective story. Poe's stormy personal life postponed honest evaluation of his work in the United States - first he gained critical acclaim in France and England. His reputation in America was relatively slight until the French-influenced writers like Ambroce Bierce, Robert W. Chambers, and representatives of the Lovecraft school secured his place in the literary hall of fame.

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to parents who were itinerant actors. His father David Poe Jr. died probably in 1810 and his mother Elizabeth Hopkins Poe in 1811, leaving three children, of whom William died young and Rosalie ultimately lost her mind. Edgar was taken into the home of a Richmond merchant John Allan and brought up partly in England (1815-20), where he attended Manor School at Stoke Newington. Never legally adopted, Poe took Allan's name for his middle name.

Poe attended the University of Virginia (1826), but was expelled for not paying his gambling debts. This led to quarrel with Allan, who later disowned him. In 1827 Poe joined the U.S. Army as a common soldier under assumed name and age. He was sent to Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, which provided settings for 'The Gold Bug' (1843) and 'The Balloon Hoax' (1844). In 1830 Poe entered West Point and was dishonorably discharged next year, for intentional neglect of his duties - apparently as a result of his own determination to be released.

Little is known about his life in this time, but in 1833 he lived in Baltimore with his father's sister Mrs. Maria Clemm. After winning a prize of $50 for the short story 'MS Found in a Bottle,' he started career as a staff member of various magazines, among others the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond (1835-37), Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in Philadelphia (1839-40), and Graham's Magazine (1842-43). During these years he wrote some of his best-known stories.

In 1836 Poe married his 13-year-old cousin Virginia Clemm. She bust a blood vessel in 1842, and remained a virtual invalid until her death from tuberculosis five years later. After the death of his wife, Poe began to lose his struggle with drinking and drugs. He addressed the famous poem 'Annabel Lee' (1849) to her - its subject, Poe's favorite, is the death of a beautiful woman.

Poe's first collection, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, appeared in 1840. It contained one of his most famous work, 'The Fall of the House of Usher.' In the story the narrator visits the crumbling mansion of his friend, Roderick Usher, and tries to dispel Roderick's gloom. Although his twin sister, Madeline, has been placed in the family vault dead, Roderick is convinced she lives. Madeline arises in trance, and carries her brother to death. The house itself splits asunder and sinks into the tarn.

According to Jorge Luis Borges, in Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) the secret theme is the terror of whiteness. In the novel Poe has invented tribes that live near the Antarctic Circle, and have been exposed to the terrible visitations of men and white storms. These are mixed together. Borges assumes that Poe chose the color intuitively, or for the same reasons as in Melville explained in the chapter 'The Whiteness of the Whale' in his Moby-Dick.

During the early 1840s Poe's best-selling work was curiously The Conchologist's First Book (1839). It was based on Thomas Wyatt's work which sold poorly because of its high prize. Wyatt was Poe's friend and asked him to abridge the book and put his own name on its title page - the publisher had strongly opposed any idea of producing a cheaper edition. The Conchologist's First Book was a success. Its first edition was sold out in two months and other editions followed.

The dark poem of lost love, 'The Raven,' brought Poe national fame, when it appeared in 1845. In a lecture in Boston Poe explained the topic telling that he had thought about English phonetics and decided that the two most effective letters in the English language were o and r - this inspired the expression "nevermore", and because a parrot is unworthy of the dignity of poetry, a raven could well repeat the word at the end of each stanza. Lenore rhymed with "nevermore."

Poe suffered from bouts of depression and madness, and he attempted suicide in 1848. In September the following year he disappeared for three days after a drink at a birthday party and on his way to visit his new fiancée in Richmond. He turned up in delirious condition in Baltimore gutter and died on October 7, 1849.

Poe's work and his theory of "pure poetry" was early recognized especially in France, where he inspired Jules Verne, Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), Paul Valéry (1871-1945) and Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898). However, in America Emerson called him "the jingle man." Poe's influence is seen in many other modern writers, as in Junichiro Tanizaki's early stories and Kobo Abe's novels, or more clearly in the development of the19th century detective novel. J.L. Borges, R.L. Stevenson, and a vast general readership, have been impressed by the cryptograms and mysteries of the stories which feature Poe's detective Dupin ('The Murders in the Rue Morgue', 1841; 'The Purloined Letter,' 1845) and the morbid metaphysical speculation of 'The Facts in the Case of M. Waldermar' (1845).

In his supernatural fiction Poe usually dealt with paranoia rooted in personal psychology, physical or mental enfeeblement, obsessions, the damnation of death, feverish fantasies, the cosmos as source of horror and inspiration, without bothering himself with such supernatural beings as ghosts, werewolves, vampires, and so on. Some of his short stories are humorous, among them 'The Devil in the Belfry,' 'The Duc de l'Omelette,' 'Bon-Bon' and 'Never Bet the Devil Your Head,' all of which employ the Devil as an ironic figure of fun. - Poe was also one of the most prolific literary journalists in American history, one whose extensive body of reviews and criticism has yet to be collected fully. James Russell Lowell (1819-91) once wrote about Poe: "Three fifths of him genius and two fifths sheer fudge."