I.

Introduction

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), American writer, known as a poet and critic but most famous as the first master of the short story form, especially tales of the mysterious and macabre.

Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809. His parents, touring actors, both died in Poe's early childhood, and the boy was raised by John Allan, a successful businessman of Richmond, Virginia who was presumably his godfather. Taken by the Allan family to England at the age of six, he was placed in a private school. Upon returning to the United States in 1820 he continued to study in private schools and attended the University of Virginia for a year, but in 1827 his foster father, displeased by the young man's drinking and gambling, refused to pay his debts and forced him to work as a clerk.

Poe, disliking his new duties intensely, left the job, thus estranging Allan, and went to Boston. There his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), was published anonymously. Shortly afterwards Poe enlisted in the US Army and served a 2-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 US Military Academy. After only a few months at the academy Poe was dismissed for neglect of duty, and his foster father disowned him permanently.

Poe's 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 “MS Found in a Bottle” won a contest sponsored by the Baltimore Saturday Visiter. From 1835 to 1837 Poe was an editor of the Southern Literary Messenger. In 1836 he married his young cousin. Through the next decade, much of which was marred by his wife's long illness, Poe worked as an editor for various periodicals in Philadelphia and New York. In 1847 Virginia died and Poe himself became ill; his disastrous alcohol addiction and his alleged use of drugs, recorded by contemporaries, may have contributed to his early death in Baltimore, on October 7, 1849.

II.

Poetry and Essays

Among Poe's poetic output, some dozen or so poems are remarkable for their flawless literary construction and for their haunting themes and metres. In “The Raven” (1845), for example, the author is overwhelmed by melancholy and omens of death. Poe's extraordinary manipulation of rhythm and sound is particularly evident in “The Bells” (1849), a poem that seems to echo with the chiming of metallic instruments, and “The Sleeper” (1831), which reproduces the state of drowsiness. “Lenore” (1831) and “Annabel Lee” (1849) are verse lamentations on the death of a beautiful young woman. His work shows the influence of English poets such as Milton, Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge and the Romantic concern with the occult and the satanic.

In the course of his editorial work, Poe functioned largely as a book reviewer, producing also a significant body of criticism; his essays were famous for their sarcasm, wit, and exposure of literary pretension. His evaluations have withstood the test of time and earned for him a high place among American literary critics. Poe's theories on the nature of fiction and, in particular, his writings on the short story, have had a lasting influence on American and European writers.

III.

Stories

Poe, by his own choice, was a poet, but economic necessity forced him to turn to the relatively profitable genre of prose. Whether or not Poe invented the short story, it is certain that he originated the novel of detection. Perhaps his best-known tale in this genre is “The Gold Bug” (1843), about a search for buried treasure. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842-1843), and “The Purloined Letter” (1844) are regarded as predecessors of the modern mystery, or detective, story.

Many of Poe's tales are distinguished by the author's unique grotesque inventiveness in addition to his superb plot construction. Such stories include “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), in which the penetrating gloominess of the atmosphere is accented equally with plot and characterization; “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1842), a spine-tingling tale of cruelty and torture; “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), in which a maniacal murderer is subconsciously haunted into confessing his guilt; and “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846), an eerie tale of revenge.