Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was born on 19 January 1809 in Boston, the son of travelling actors David Poe Jr. and Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe. His father abandoned the family; his mother died of tuberculosis in 1811, when Edgar was two. He was taken in (though never formally adopted) by John Allan, a prosperous Richmond, Virginia, tobacco merchant, whose surname Poe added to his own. The relationship between Poe and his foster father was difficult, marked by resentment over money and conflicting expectations, and it shaped the sense of dispossession and wounded pride that pervades Poe’s life and work.

Life and Career

Poe attended the University of Virginia for a single session in 1826, excelling academically but accumulating gambling debts that Allan refused to pay, forcing his withdrawal. He enlisted in the army, rose to the rank of sergeant major, and secured an appointment to West Point in 1830, only to get himself deliberately court-martialled and dismissed in 1831 when he concluded that Allan would never support him financially.

Thereafter Poe lived by his pen — the first major American writer to attempt this — in a succession of cities: Baltimore, Richmond, Philadelphia, New York. He worked as an editor, critic, and reviewer for a series of magazines, including the Southern Literary Messenger, Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, Graham’s Magazine, and the Broadway Journal. His critical reviews were brilliant, savage, and feared; he demolished mediocrities with relish and championed original work wherever he found it. He was perpetually underpaid and frequently destitute.

In 1835 he married his first cousin Virginia Clemm. She was thirteen; he was twenty-six. The marriage appears to have been devoted, and Virginia’s slow death from tuberculosis between 1842 and 1847 was the great catastrophe of his life. Her illness and death intensified the morbid obsessions that already pervaded his work and accelerated his alcoholism — he had an abnormally low tolerance for alcohol; small quantities produced dramatic effects.

“The Raven,” published in January 1845, made Poe famous overnight but earned him only about $9. He spent his last years in poverty, grief, and deteriorating health, writing some of his most ambitious work — the cosmological prose poem Eureka (1848) — while drinking destructively and pursuing ill-fated romantic attachments. On 3 October 1849 he was found delirious on the streets of Baltimore. He died four days later at Washington Medical College, aged forty. The cause of his death remains unknown; hypotheses range from alcoholism to rabies to cooping (the practice of kidnapping citizens and forcing them to vote repeatedly in elections).

Major Works and Themes

Poe’s range is far broader than his reputation for the Gothic and the macabre suggests. He invented the detective story with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842), and “The Purloined Letter” (1844) — the three C. Auguste Dupin stories that provided the template for every subsequent fictional detective from Sherlock Holmes onward. He was a pioneer of science fiction, an innovative literary critic, an accomplished poet, and the most important theorist of the short story as a form.

His tales of terror — “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842), “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846), “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1842) — remain unsurpassed in their claustrophobic intensity and psychological precision. Poe understood that the truest horror is internal: guilt, obsession, paranoia, and the disintegration of the rational mind.

“The Raven” (1845) is the most famous American poem of the nineteenth century — a metrically virtuosic meditation on loss, memory, and the irreversibility of death. Its incantatory repetitions and Gothic atmosphere made it an immediate sensation. Eureka (1848), a cosmological prose poem that Poe himself considered his masterpiece, anticipated aspects of Big Bang cosmology by nearly a century.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Poe’s reputation in America has always been complicated. During his lifetime he was admired as a critic and storyteller but dismissed by some (notably Emerson, who called him “the jingle man”) as a sensationalist. After his death, his literary executor Rufus Griswold published a defamatory biography that poisoned Poe’s reputation for decades. In France, by contrast, Baudelaire translated and championed Poe with an almost religious fervour; through Baudelaire and later Mallarmé, Poe became a central figure in the Symbolist movement and a permanent fixture of the European literary canon.

The twentieth century gradually rehabilitated Poe’s American reputation. T.S. Eliot and Allen Tate remained skeptical, but critics from Edmund Wilson onward recognised his foundational importance. He is now understood as one of the three or four most influential American writers of the nineteenth century — alongside Whitman, Melville, and Dickinson.

His legacy is incalculable: without Poe, no Conan Doyle, no Agatha Christie, no Raymond Chandler; no Baudelaire, no Symbolism, no Surrealism; no Lovecraft, no modern horror fiction; no science fiction as a self-conscious genre.

Key Works

• Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827)
• Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1839)
• “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841)
• “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842)
• “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843)
• “The Purloined Letter” (1844)
• “The Raven” (1845)
• The Raven and Other Poems (1845)
• “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846)
• Eureka: A Prose Poem (1848)

Collecting Poe

Edgar Allan Poe is one of the towering names in American book collecting, and his first editions include some of the rarest and most valuable items in all of American literature.

Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827, Calvin F.S. Thomas, Boston), Poe’s first book, published anonymously (“By a Bostonian”) in an edition of perhaps fifty copies, is the holy grail of American book collecting. Only twelve copies are known to survive. When a copy surfaces at auction it is a major event: a copy sold at Christie’s in 2009 for $662,500. It is one of the three or four most valuable American literary first editions.

Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829, Hatch & Dunning, Baltimore) is the second book, also published in a tiny edition. Fewer than twenty copies are known. Prices at auction have reached $200,000–$400,000.

Poems (1831, Elam Bliss, New York), the third book of poetry, is comparably rare. The title page reads “Second Edition” (because it recycles some poems from the earlier volumes), but it is a first edition of the book itself.

Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1839, Lea and Blanchard, Philadelphia, two volumes) is the first collection of tales and the most important Poe prose first edition. Published in an edition of 750 copies, of which Poe received no royalties. Fine copies in the original muslin binding bring $100,000–$300,000 at auction.

The Raven and Other Poems (1845, Wiley and Putnam, New York) is more accessible: fine copies in the original printed wrappers or cloth binding bring $10,000–$50,000.

Eureka: A Prose Poem (1848, Putnam, New York) was published in an edition of 500 copies. Fine copies bring $10,000–$30,000.

Poe autograph material is of extreme rarity and extraordinary value. His letters — of which perhaps 300 survive — command $20,000–$100,000 depending on content. Manuscript pages of his literary work are among the most valuable American literary manuscripts in existence. The major Poe collections are at the Harry Ransom Center (University of Texas), the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, the University of Virginia, and the Morgan Library.