Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Poe was orphaned before he was three, when his mother, a traveling actress, died in Richmond. He was taken in but never adopted by John Allan, a Richmond merchant, whose name he added to his own and with whom he quarreled for the rest of Allan's life. He left the University of Virginia in debt, enlisted in the army under a false name, got himself expelled from West Point, and turned to writing, which in the America of the 1830s paid almost nothing.

Poe made his living as a magazine editor and reviewer in Richmond, Philadelphia, and New York, feared for the savagery of his criticism. His tales of terror — The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Pit and the Pendulum — set a standard for psychological horror. The Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1841, featuring the reasoning detective C. Auguste Dupin, is generally considered the first modern detective story, and its formula of a brilliant amateur and an admiring narrator shaped Sherlock Holmes.

The Raven, published in January 1845, made him famous almost overnight, though it earned him little. In 1836 he had married his cousin Virginia Clemm, who was thirteen. Her long decline from tuberculosis and her death in 1847 haunt the poems of his last years. In October 1849 he was found delirious in a Baltimore tavern, wearing someone else's clothes, and died four days later. The cause has never been established.

His literary executor, Rufus Griswold, wrote a vicious obituary and memoir that fixed the image of Poe as a drunken madman for a century. Abroad his reputation went the other way. Charles Baudelaire translated his work into French, and Poe became a founding influence on French Symbolism. Detective fiction, science fiction, and horror all claim him as an ancestor, and he remains one of the most widely read American writers of any era.