Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Poe was born in Boston on 19 January 1809, the son of two travelling actors. His mother died in Richmond on 8 December 1811; the boy was taken in by John and Frances Allan of Richmond, who never legally adopted him. His earliest surviving poem, two lines written around 1824, was never published in his lifetime.

In March 1827, after a quarrel with John Allan over $2,000 of gambling debts run up at the University of Virginia, he left home. That same year Tamerlane and Other Poems came out in Boston from Calvin F. S. Thomas. The author was named only as "A Bostonian". He was 18. The thin pamphlet sold perhaps 50 copies, many of them likely given away for reviews. Only twelve copies are known today.

After enlisting in the army as Edgar A. Perry and being dismissed from West Point in 1831, he brought out two more books of poems, in 1829 and 1831. The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore sums up those years: little money and only minor critical success. Poetry remained his first love, but he saw he would need more than verse to make a living as a writer, and he turned to tales.

In July 1831 he sent several stories to a contest run by the Philadelphia Saturday Courier. He did not win; five of his tales were printed, without his name. By 1833 he had written eleven stories he hoped to publish as a set, Tales of the Folio Club. All his life his work paid little: $24 for "The Fall of the House of Usher", $10 for "The Tell-Tale Heart". The two magazines he dreamed of founding, The Penn and then The Stylus, never appeared for lack of capital.

The Baltimore Saturday Visiter, which had already printed four of his poems in the spring of 1833, ran a contest. On 7 October 1833 three judges, among them the writer John Pendleton Kennedy, met at one of their houses and gave the $50 prose prize to "MS. Found in a Bottle". Poe was 24. His poem "The Coliseum" came second.

Above all, the prize won him Kennedy's friendship, and Kennedy recommended him to Thomas W. White, owner of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond. Poe became its editor in 1835. Ten years later, on 29 January 1845, "The Raven" appeared in the New York Evening Mirror and became a sensation, reprinted everywhere. By family tradition it earned him about $15, but according to the Poe Museum in Richmond it made his name a household word, and lectures and public readings followed.

Poe earned his living in magazines, as editor and as critic. At the Southern Literary Messenger he wrote a great many reviews, frank enough to win him both praise and scorn, and printed his own poems and tales. At Graham's Magazine, where "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", the first modern detective story, appeared in April 1841, circulation rose from about 5,000 to nearly 37,000 subscribers during his time there. At the Evening Mirror, his employer N. P. Willis remembered him at his desk from nine in the morning until the evening paper went to press, invariably punctual and industrious.

In April 1846 he published "The Philosophy of Composition" in Graham's, claiming to take "The Raven" apart step by step. You start from an effect, not a plot. You set the length at what can be read in one sitting, about a hundred lines (the poem has 108). Then you write the last stanza first, the one "Nevermore" must answer. The Poe Society of Baltimore points out that this account is largely fictional, by Poe's own admission; the poem was most probably written in late 1844, on a farm in New York.

Raised in Richmond, with five years in England between 1815 and 1820, Poe later lived in Baltimore with his aunt Maria Clemm. On 16 May 1836, aged 27, he married his cousin Virginia, who was 13. The family moved to New York, then to Philadelphia in 1838, and back to New York in 1844. Virginia died of tuberculosis on 30 January 1847, in the cottage at Fordham.

On 3 October 1849 he was found in Baltimore in a condition that witnesses described in conflicting ways. He died in hospital on 7 October 1849, aged 40; the cause of his death remains unknown. Rufus Griswold's hostile obituary, published two days later, shaped his legend for decades. In France he is read above all in Baudelaire's translations, collected as Histoires extraordinaires.