About the Author

Despite a life of poverty, deep tragedy, and recurring mental and psychological instability, Edgar Allan Poe remains today one of the most influential of all American writers, almost single-handedly anticipating later nineteenth-century movements including symbolism, surrealism, and expressionism. He invented the modern detective story and the "ideal short-story," and developed a theory of literature on the strength of pure aesthetics.

Poe was born to itinerant actors in Boston, on January 19, 1809. After his father David's desertion, his mother died when Edgar was only two, and Edgar was accepted into the home of John Allan and his family. Business affairs took the Allan family to England where Poe lived and studied between 1815 and 1820 when they returned to Richmond, Virginia. Poe entered the University of Virginia in 1826, but following gambling debts, withdrew after his first year. He left the Allan family in 1827 for Boston where he published Tamerlane and Other Poems and then enlisted in the United States Army. John Allan secured an appointment for Poe at West Point, but following a heated dispute, the young writer engineered his own dismissal in 1831.

In the same year, Poe moved into the home of his aunt, later falling in love with his cousin, Virginia, whom he secretly married in 1835, when she was not quite fourteen. Already publishing both poetry and some of his early short stories, Poe's reputation as a writer, editor, and critic brought him more and more attention and, most important, periodic employment. He served as the assistant editor for the Richmond Southern Literary Messenger and later, in Philadelphia, on the staff of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, Graham's Magazine, and The Saturday Museum. These same years, between 1835 and 1843, were to be the period of his most outstanding literary achievements. Assuring his literary fame, Poe won the coveted $100 prize, sponsored by the Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper in 1843, for his short story "The Gold Bug."

Poe left Philadelphia for New York in 1844 where he found limited work with the Evening Mirror and the Broadway Journal. Meanwhile, Virginia was succumbing to tuberculosis, and the couple moved into a cottage in Fordham, New York in 1846, where Virginia died the following January. Increasingly estranged from his colleagues, both for his erratic behavior and enemies earned through his published criticism, Poe became engaged to his childhood sweetheart, Sarah Elmira Royster, following the death of her first husband. After a business trip to Philadelphia two months later, Poe was discovered seriously injured and delirious in a tavern in Baltimore. Never fully regaining his senses, he died four days later, the exact cause of his death remaining undetermined.

Poe's major published works include Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829), Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), and The Raven and Other Poems (1845).