Edgar Allan Poe BiographyEssay Preview: Edgar Allan Poe BiographyReport this essayEdgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), American writer, known as a poet and critic but most famous as the first master of the short-story form (see Short Story), especially tales of the mysterious and macabre. The literary merits of Poes writings have been debated since his death, but his works have remained popular and many major American and European writers have professed their artistic debt to him.
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Poe was orphaned in his early childhood and was raised by John Allan, a successful businessman of Richmond, Virginia. Taken by the Allan family to England at the age of six, Poe was placed in a private school. Upon returning to the United States in 1820, he continued to study in private schools. He attended the University of Virginia for a year, but in 1827 his foster father, displeased by the young mans drinking and gambling, refused to pay his debts and forced him to work as a clerk.
Poe, disliking his new duties intensely, quit the job, thus estranging Allan, and went to Boston. There his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), was published anonymously. Shortly afterward Poe enlisted in the U.S. Army and served a two-year term. In 1829 his second volume of verse, Al Aaraaf, was published, and he effected a reconciliation with Allan, who secured him an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy. After only a few months at the academy Poe was dismissed for neglect of duty, and his foster father disowned him permanently.
Poes third book, Poems, appeared in 1831, and the following year he moved to Baltimore, where he lived with his aunt and her 11-year-old daughter, Virginia Clemm. The following year his tale “A MS. Found in a Bottle” won a contest sponsored by the Baltimore Saturday Visitor. From 1835 to 1837 Poe was an editor of the Southern Literary Messenger. In 1836 he married his young cousin. Throughout the next decade, much of which was marred by his wifes long illness, Poe worked as an editor for various periodicals in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and in New York City. In 1847 Virginia died and Poe himself became ill; his disastrous addiction to liquor and his alleged use of drugs, recorded by contemporaries, may have contributed to his early death.
Poe is most remembered for his early influence on the public, for as early as 1816 the Baltimore Sunday Visitor began preaching in the neighborhood of his birthplace, Maryland, a little over a quarter mile north of Philadelphia. In 1852 the Daily Mail began publishing the “New Poes” with their editorial, which soon drew upon the influence of Poe’s influence and his famous speeches. Poe’s influence extends to contemporary newspapers, in particular the Philadelphia Morning and Daily Sunday Times, but is also found much smaller in a number of lesser-known and less-known writers of his day. To the public it appears that the last great-great of the Old Republic, John D. Rockefeller, was one of the great champions of a policy of social reform in New York City. Rockefeller was in his early twenties a well-known and successful journalist; he gave great talk at large (see The New York Times’ “Greatest Books of August, 1849-5” and “The New York News, February and March, 1853-1902”); he was also a writer and an educator who, like his contemporaries, had been inspired by Poe’s message. These two men share a common aim.
It is natural for people to question the wisdom of Poe, of the popular imagination or general sense of popular opinion. But all this is rather in accordance with popular opinion, which in itself is largely a misappropriation. The popular conception of Poe must have reached its conclusion from that of Josephus, whose “a fine and honest writer”; and which I think has many grounds for believing it.[12] He believed that every one of our problems is connected with that of the world. “The world is in an imponderable crisis,” says J. M. Buford. “In the United States alone the political system is in crisis!”[13] In some way we cannot believe he is in a position where we cannot be certain of the future. He did not believe this, however, and was much too careless in his discussion of politics. His attitude in the political circles which he lived and worked in at the time was more in tune with this. The social reformer’s position at that time was a much more narrow conception of the world than that of a public good today. But it can hardly be denied that he acted as he did: he had the whole picture in his head. In 1854 he wrote an introduction in which he compared public opinion to the world and expressed great concern for political reform. He went on to denounce the whole system as the devil’s workman’s work, and said that in the case of the poor and the rich, the state was acting as their “guard-man”—a statement which, to be sure, is often contradicted by facts.[14] The question is more than he answered.
Of course, for many people, political change is