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Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 19, 1809. When Poe’s mother died of tuberculosis in 1811, two-year-old Edgar was sent to live with John Allan and his wife Frances in Richmond, Virginia. The Allans were wealthy merchants, and Poe was given the best possible education, including a stint in Scotland and England from 1815–1820. At 17, Poe enrolled at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, but had to return to Richmond after less than a year because of gambling debts. Due to his poor relationship with his adopted father and a failed romantic relationship, Poe left Richmond for Boston in 1827. There, Poe joined the military and published his first two volumes of poetry, Tamerlane, and Other Poems (1827) and Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829). After a brief time at West Point Academy, Poe was expelled for extreme dereliction of duty, and he moved to New York City. He published Poems in 1831 and soon after moved to Baltimore to live with his aunt, Maria Clemm, and her daughter Virginia. 

In Baltimore, Poe started to write short stories, beginning with “MS. Found in a Bottle” (1833) which won a cash prize from a Baltimore magazine. Poe struggled to earn a living until he landed a job as an editor at Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond. He brought Maria and Virginia to live with him in Richmond in 1834 and later married Virginia, then only 13 years old, in 1836. At Southern Literary Messenger and in other editorial jobs over the next 10 years, Poe established his reputation as an insightful literary critic, an important and sometimes overlooked part of his legacy. Poe believed that works of literature should be crafted with intense attention to detail, down to each word, and should evoke a sense of revelation. This analytical method also informed his own writing and inspired his works of ratiocination and horror. Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and other works of ratiocination are the first examples of detective fiction, where an amateur detective solves a crime using deductive reasoning skills. Poe’s horror stories such as “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” seek to reveal some truth about the human condition, often through the intense psychology of a first-person narrator. These tales of ratiocination and horror are credited with inspiring such writers as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and H.G. Wells. 

In 1845, Edgar Allan Poe wrote and published his poem “The Raven,” which immediately drew widespread praise and garnered him national recognition. However, Poe still struggled to earn a good living. After his wife Virginia died of tuberculosis in 1847, Poe became involved in several unsuccessful romantic pursuits. In September of 1849, Poe left Richmond for Baltimore where he was seen at a tavern on October 3rd, delirious or drunk and wearing someone else’s clothes. He was taken to a hospital where he died of unspecified causes on October 7th. Today Poe is recognized as a titan of American literature and a writer whose works have strongly influenced the literary forms and writers of the 20th century.

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