Edgar Allan Poe

The figure of Edgar Allan Poe, in all his strangeness, might conjure up a possible Poe protagonist: The Man with Too Many Faces. Poe is the archetypal genius, with shades of the Gothic: a brilliant literary and linguistic theorist and critic; a gambler and heavy drinker; a dedicated and hardworking journalist; one of the first nationally known Southern writers; the creator of truly disturbing Gothic tales; a poet of mathematical rhythm and precision; one of the founders of the detective-mystery literary genre; the inspiration of countercultural French writers like Baudelaire … the list could go on. To consider Poe is not to reduce such multiplicity to any single interpretation, but rather to paint as broad a picture as possible of the many facets of his private and public lives (Hoffman, 5).

Poe's biography reveals the extent of his mixture of peril and promise, tragedy and talent. Born in Boston on January 19, 1809, to two itinerant actors, by age two Poe was an orphan—his mother dead, his father vanished—and the ward of the wealthy Virginian John Allan. The list of subsequent failures, controversies, and losses is lengthy and infamous: 1827—forced to withdraw from the University of Virginia after only one year because of gambling debts; 1831—court-martialed and dismissed from West Point for dereliction of duty, leading to his 1832 exclusion from Allan's will; 1835—married to thirteen-year-old Virginia Clemm, whose extended illness and death in 1847 would drive him to drink and subsequent ill health; 1849—found in Baltimore in a coma (possibly induced by drink), he died on October 7.

Poe's achievements, in all realms of the literary world, are impressive. He began writing poems at the age of thirteen; his first book of poetry, Tamerlane and Other Poems, was published in 1827. In 1832 his first five short stories were published, and within a year one of the stories had won a prestigious Baltimore literary contest. By 1835 Poe was a regular contributor of tales and reviews to the Southern Literary Messenger, which he began to edit in 1836. He then wrote a well-received novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), which has recently been reexamined for the racial themes of its complex conclusion; a mystery story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), which helped inaugurate the genre and provided in Dupin a model for Sherlock Holmes (among many other detectives); and a constant stream of journalistic pieces, reviews ...