Poe, Edgar Allan 1809-49
US poet and short-story writer, the pioneer of the modern detective story

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts. After being orphaned in his third year, he was adopted by John Allan (1780-1834), a wealthy and childless merchant in Richmond, Virginia. The family lived in England from 1815 to 1820, where Poe went to school in Stoke Newington. He spent a year at the University of Virginia (1826) but after turning to gambling in an attempt to pay off his debts, he had a quarrel with his patron (Allan) and ran away to Boston.

In 1827 he published his first volume of verse, Tamerlane and other Poems, and enlisted in the US army, becoming sergeant-major in 1829. John Allan procured his discharge and, after a year's delay in which Poe published a second volume of verse, Al Aaraaf (1829), his admission to West Point Military Academy (1830). The following March he was dismissed for deliberate neglect of duty. Again reliant on his own resources, he went to New York City and brought out a third edition of his Poems (1831), which contained 'Israfel', his earliest poem of value, and 'To Helen'.

He then turned to journalism and story-writing, living in Baltimore with his aunt, Mrs Clemm, until 1835. His story 'A MS. found in a Bottle' won a prize in 1833. In 1835 he went to Richmond as assistant editor on the Southern Literary Messenger (1835-37), and the following year married his 13-year-old cousin Virginia Clemm. He left Richmond in 1837, returned briefly to New York, where he published Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and established himself in Philadelphia in 1838. There he was co-editor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine (1839-40) for which he wrote the well-known story 'The Fall of the House of Usher', and he published Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1839) in 1840. He resigned from Burton's in 1840, and went on to edit Graham's Magazine (1841-42), in which he published his pioneering detective story 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue'. He won another short-story competition in 1843 with 'The Gold Bug'.

In 1844 he returned again to New York, where he held various journalistic posts. His poem 'The Raven' appeared first in the New York Evening Mirror, then in The Raven and Other Poems (both 1845), and won him immediate fame but not fortune.

His wife died in 1847, and in November 1848 he attempted suicide. Recovering from alcohol addiction in 1849, he spent over two months in Richmond, lecturing there and at Norfolk, became engaged to a lady of means, but died after being found in a wretched, delirious condition in Baltimore. The poems 'The Bells' and 'Annabel Lee', the tale 'The Domain of Arnheim', and the bizarre philosophical 'prose poem' Eureka (1848) were his last works of note.

Weird, wild, fantastic, and dwelling by choice on the horrible, Poe's genius was nevertheless great. His short stories show genuine originality, and his poems, the chief charm of which is exquisite melody, have been admired by W B Yeats, Hart Crane and others.

Bibliography: Daniel G Hoffman, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (1973); W Bittner, Poe: a biography (1962); Arthur H Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (1941, reprinted 1969).