Biography

Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809–October 7, 1849) was an American poet, short story writer, editor and critic. He is best known for his tales of the macabre and his poems.

Life

Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of actress Eliza Poe and actor David Poe, Jr.. Both of Poe's parents died before he was three years old, and Poe was taken into the home of John Allan, a successful merchant in Richmond, Virginia, and baptized Edgar Allan Poe. After attending schools in England and Richmond, Virginia, Poe registered at the University of Virginia, but stayed for only one year. Poe enlisted in the US Army as a private using the name Edgar A. Perry on May 26, 1827. After serving for two years and attaining the rank of Sergeant-major, Poe was discharged. Poe received an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, but apparently deliberately disobeyed orders to compel a dismissal.

Poe next moved to Baltimore, Maryland with his widowed aunt, Maria Clemm, and her daughter, Virginia. Poe used his fiction as a means of supporting himself, and with the December issue of 1835, Poe began editing the Southern Literary Messenger for Thomas W. White in Richmond. This position was held by Poe until January, 1837. During this time, Poe married his young cousin, Virginia Clemm, in Richmond on May 16, 1836.

After spending fifteen fruitless months in New York, Poe moved to Philadelphia. Shortly after he arrived, his novella The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym was published and widely reviewed. In the summer of 1839, he became assistant editor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine. He published a large number of articles, stories and reviews, enhancing the reputation as a trenchant critic that he had established at the Southern Literary Messenger. In 1839, the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque was published in two volumes. Though not a financial success, it was a milestone in the history of American literature. Poe left Burton's after about a year and found a position as assistant editor at Graham's Magazine.

Virginia suffered a lung hemorrhage in January 1842. It was the first sign of the tuberculosis that would make her an invalid and eventually take her life. Poe began to drink more heavily under the stress of Virginia's illness. He left Graham's and attempted to find a new position, for a time angling for a government post.

He returned to New York, where he worked briefly at the Evening Mirror before becoming editor of the Broadway Journal. There he became involved in a noisy public feud with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In January 1845, his poem "The Raven" appeared in the Evening Mirror and became a popular sensation.

The Broadway Journal failed in 1846. Poe moved to a cottage several miles outside Manhattan. Virginia died there in 1847. Increasingly unstable after his wife's death, Poe attempted to court the poet Sarah Helen Whitman. He then returned to Richmond and resumed a relationship with a childhood sweetheart, Sarah Elmira Royster, who by that time was a widow. Poe died while visiting Baltimore in 1849.

Poe was five feet, eight inches in height and slightly built.

Poe's death

Poe arrived in Baltimore, Maryland, on September 27, 1849.

On the 3rd of October, he was found on the streets, delirious and "in great distress, and... in need of immediate assistance," according to the man who found him. He was taken to the Washington College Hospital, where he died early on the morning of October 7. Poe was never coherent long enough to explain how he came to be in his dire condition, and wearing clothes that were not his own. However, before he died he uttered his last words "Lord help my poor soul."

The precise cause of Poe's death is disputed.

Dr. J. E. Snodgrass, an acquaintance of Poe's who was among those who saw him in his last days, was convinced that Poe's death was a result of drunkenness, and did a great deal to popularise this interpretation of the events. He was, however, a supporter of the temperance movement who found Poe a useful example in his work; later scholars have shown that his account of Poe's death distorts facts to support his theory.

Dr. John Moran, the physician who attended Poe, stated in his own 1885 account that "Edgar Allan Poe did not die under the effect of any intoxicant, nor was the smell of liquor upon his breath or person." This was, however, only one of several sometimes contradictory accounts of Poe's last days he published over the years, so his testimony cannot be considered entirely reliable.

Numerous other theories have been proposed over the years, including several forms of rare brain disease, various types of enzyme deficiency, rabies (http://www.umm.edu/news/releases/news-releases-17.html) (though some consider this unlikely), syphilis, and the idea that Poe was shanghaied, drugged, and used as a pawn in a ballot-box-stuffing scam during the election that was held on the day he was found.

In the absence of contemporary documentation (all surviving accounts are either incomplete or published years after the event; even Poe's death certificate, if one was ever made out, has been lost), it is likely that the truth of Poe's death will never be known.

Poe is now buried on the grounds of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Baltimore. Every year since 1949, a cloaked, unknown admirer has left a birthday rose and a bottle of whiskey on Poe's grave. This has become something of a local mystery, and there has been speculation that at least two people have, over the years, been responsible for the midnight ceremony.

Griswold and Poe's biography

The day Poe was buried, a long obituary appeared in the New York Tribune, signed "Ludwig." This remarkably bitter obituary depicted Poe as dishonest, immoral and morbidly ambitious, insane and incapable of normal human feelings. It was reprinted in numerous papers across the country. "Ludwig" was soon identified as Rufus Griswold, a minor editor and anthologist who had borne a grudge against Poe since 1842, when Poe wrote a review of one of Griswold's anthologies, a review that Griswold found insufficiently laudatory. Though they were coolly polite in person, an enmity developed between the two men as they clashed over various matters. Griswold took advantage of Poe's death to settle the score.

Griswold went on to assume the role of Poe's literary executor, though no evidence exists that Poe had ever made this exceedingly improbable choice. He convinced Poe's destitute mother-in-law Maria Clemm to hand over a mass of letters and manuscripts (which were never returned) and allow him to prepare an edition of Poe's collected works. Griswold assured Clemm that she would receive significant royalties, but she received nothing but a few sets of the edition, which she had to sell herself to realize a derisory return.

Griswold wrote a biographical "Memoir" of Poe which he included in an additional volume of the collected works. This biography depicted Poe as a depraved, drunk, drug-addled madman. It distorted almost every point of Poe's biography, and included items forged by Griswold to bolster his case. This libelous picture of Poe was immediately denounced by those who knew him well, but Griswold's account became the popularly accepted one, in part because it was the only full biography available and was widely reprinted, and in part because it seemed to accord with the narrative voice Poe used in much of his fantastic fiction.

No accurate biography of Poe appeared until John Ingram's of 1875. By then, however, Griswold's distortions were entrenched, not only in America but around the world. Griswold's false picture continues to color the popular image of Poe to this day.

Legacy

Poe's curious and often nightmarish work greatly influenced the horror and fantasy genres. He is also credited with originating the genre of detective fiction with his three stories about Auguste Dupin, the most famous of which is "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." There is no doubt that he inspired mystery writers who came after him, particularly Arthur Conan Doyle in The Hound of the Baskervilles. He also profoundly influenced the development of early science fiction author Jules Verne.

Poe's literary reputation was greater abroad than it was in the United States, perhaps as a result of America's general revulsion towards the macabre. Rufus Griswold's defamatory reminisicences did little to commend Poe to U.S. literary society.

In France, where he is commonly known as "Edgar Poe," Charles Baudelaire translated his stories and several of the poems into French. Baudelaire was the right man for this job, and his excellent translations meant that Poe enjoyed a vogue among avant-garde writers in France while being ignored in his native land. From France, writers like Algernon Charles Swinburne caught the Poe-bug, and Swinburne's musical verse owes much to Poe's technique. Poe was much admired, also, by the school of Symbolism, and Stéphane Mallarmé dedicated several poems to him.

Poe's poetry was translated into Russian by the Symbolist poet Konstantin Bal'mont and enjoyed great popularity there in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Poe influenced the Swedish poet and author Viktor Rydberg, who translated a considerable amount of Poe's work into Swedish.

The Mystery Writers of America have named their awards for excellence in the genre the "Edgars."

Eureka, a prose poem written in 1848, included a cosmological theory that anticipated the Big Bang theory by eighty years, as well as the first plausible solution to Olbers's paradox.

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