Short Bio:
The following biography is a summation of the Wiki article
on Edgar Allan Poe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Allan_Poe)
and a biography by Peter Ackroyd, (Poe, A
Life Cut Short – Nan A. Talese, an imprint of The Doubleday Printing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York, 2008).
Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts on January
19, 1809, to Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe and David Poe, Jr. – the second of three children (brother William Henry Leonard Poe and sister
Rosalie Poe) to these two actors. His father abandoned the family in 1810 and
his mother died a year later from consumption. Poe was fostered, though never
adopted, by John and Francis Valentine Allan of Richmond, Virginia.
During his school years, he attended a number of
institutions, some in the U.S. and some in England (most notably – as it pertains
to my blog entry on Griswold and Ingram – the Reverend John Bransby’s Manor
House School in Stoke Newington), ultimately attending the University of
Virginia in February of 1826. However,
his college career ended after only one year, when mounting gambling debts that
his foster father refused to pay, found him at odds with the ideals of the
university. Soon after he moved to Boston where he started working as a clerk
and newspaper writer, using the pseudonym of Henri Le Rennet. However, quickly finding that he was unable to
support himself, he enlisted in the US Army in May of 1827, where he remained
for two years and published his first book of poetry, Tamerlane and Other Poems, under the name “by a Bostonian”. After
obtaining an early dismissal in April of 1829, he published his second book, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems before entering West Point, where he
successfully matriculated as a cadet one year later. However, after numerous quarrels with his
foster father and a growing disinterest in the military, he purposefully
conducted himself in such a way as to be court-martialed and thus left West
Point in February of 1831.
He moved to New York City and published a third volume of
poems called Poems, financed by
donations from his fellow cadets at West Point.
It was a republication of his first two works with six new poems in it.
He then moved back to Baltimore in March of 1831 to live with his aunt (Maria
Clemm), cousin (Virginia Clemm) and brother, who, on August 1, 1831, died from
complications brought about by alcoholism. Up to this time in his life, he was
a relative unknown, but in October of 1833 he won a prize from the Baltimore Saturday Visiter for his short
story “MS. Found in a Bottle”, which was
noticed by John P. Kennedy. Kennedy helped
him to place more of his stories and introduced him to Thomas W. White, the
editor of the Southern Literary Messenger
in Richmond, Virginia. White hired him as an assistant editor in August 1835
where he remained employed until Jan 1837, though his tenure was a bit rocky
due to his penchant for drink. During this
time he honed his skills as a literary critic.
On Sept. 22, 1835, he secretly married Virginia Clemm, then
13 years old but claiming to be 21.
Later that year he published The
Narragive of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and in 1839 became the
assistant editor of Burton’s Gentleman’s
Magazine where he continued his career as a literary critic. In 1839 he
published “The Tales of the Grotesque and
Arabesque” and left Burton’s for
a job as assistant at Graham’s Magazine.
In June 1840, he announced his intentions to start his own
literary journal, originally slated to be called The Penn and later The Stylus,
however, he was unable to accomplish this endeavor during his lifetime. In
1842, he moved back to New York City where he eventually became the editor,
then sole owner, of the Broadway Journal,
however after accusing Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of plagiarism, he was soon
ostracized from the literary community. He regained popularity, though not
financial security, in January 1845, when his poem, “The Raven”, was published.
In 1846, The Broadway
Journal failed and Poe moved into a cottage in the Bronx, New York ,where
on January 30, 1847, Virginia died of tuberculosis. Poe’s mental health
deteriorated after this and he was increasingly drawn to drink. He attempted to court the poet Sarah Helen
Whitman, and then his childhood sweetheart, Sarah Elmira Royster, but was
unable to regain any sense of normalcy with either
On October 3, 1849, Poe was found on the streets of
Baltimore in a state of delirium and wearing someone else's clothes. He was
taken to Washington Medical College where he died on October 7, 1849. On the night before he died he is reported to
have repeatedly called out the name “Reynolds”.
Unfortunately, all of the medical records, including his death
certificate, have been lost. Speculations as to what caused his death include
alcoholism, heart disease, epilepsy, syphilis, menigeal inflammation, cholera
and even rabies. One theory states that
he was a victim of vote-rigging or cooping – a process whereby someone was
drugged and forced to vote in multiple jurisdictions after which they were
sometimes beaten or killed.
*******************
Due to the plethora of information collected by John Ingram
and all the subsequent biographers who followed him, the information on Poe’s
life, though in some ways still sketchy, is vast. That said, I found it very hard to condense
this into a truly “Short Bio” and thus a review of one of his stories will
appear in a separate post rather than appended to this one.
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