Poe

On October 7, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe died at Washington College Hospital in Baltimore. The forty-year-old author had been found four days earlier in a delirious condition wearing shabby clothes that were not his own. He never regained enough consciousness to explain what had happened to him.

Poe crammed a great deal of living into his short life. Born into a thespian family in Boston, Poe’s alcoholic father abandoned the family soon after Edgar’s birth. The boy’s mother died of tuberculosis when he was three. An uncle sent Poe to Virginia to live with John Allan, a wealthy merchant. Edgar took his adoptive parents’ surname as his middle name and spent his youth attending schools in England and Virginia. Poe enrolled at the University of Virginia where he studied ancient and modern languages. However, Poe claimed that the Allans had not given him sufficient money to support himself at UVA. The eighteen-year-old dropped out and enlisted in the army in 1827. Within two years he attained the rank of Sergeant Major, the highest rank possible for a non-commissioned officer.

Despite his success, the mercurial young man requested a discharge from his five-year commitment. After being discharged, Poe oddly decided to enroll at West Point. Within six months at the Point, Poe was court martialed, a process he initiated by refusing to attend formations, classes, or church. His fellow cadets raised $170 to help Poe move to New York
City where he published his first book of poems in 1831.

Literary Life
Throughout the 1830s Poe worked as a magazine editor while making some questionable lifestyle choices. At age 27, Poe married Virginia Clemm who was just 13 years old. The following year he was fired from his magazine because of his excessive drinking. He became well known as a literary critic but became estranged from the literary establishment when he publicly accused Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of plagiarism. Longfellow never responded to Poe’s allegations.

In 1841, Poe published the short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, a crime thriller featuring detective C. Auguste Dupin. It was the first story of the detective genre and he followed that successful tale with “The Purloined Letter”. Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes credits Poe as a key influence. Poe then began producing spellbinding short stories including “The Tell-Tale Heart”, and “The Pit and the Pendulum” that place the reader into the middle of the protagonist’s nightmarish experiences. In 1845, Poe became a household name with the publication of his dark introspective poem “The Raven”.

Mysterious Death
The iconic author’s mysterious death paralleled the type of macabre stories that made Poe famous. Newspapers at the time reported Poe’s death as “congestion of the brain”, a common euphemism for death from alcoholism. Investigative historians have attributed his death to everything from syphilis to rabies. One popular theory is that Poe was a victim of “cooping”, a fraudulent voting practice where victims were drugged and forced to vote for a specific candidate at multiple polling stations. That hypothesis is certainly possible given that Poe’s alcoholism made him easily manipulated and he was found in another person’s clothing.

Legacy
Where do we start? Poe was the first author of the detective genre and is considered “the Godfather of Gothic Horror.” Science fiction pioneer Jules Verne credits Poe as an important influence and best-selling horror author H.P. Lovecraft hailed Poe as his “God of Fiction”. Alfred Hitchcock professed that he began making suspense films because of his love of Poe’s stories. Perhaps nothing sums up Poe’s influence more than the fact that the Mystery Writers of America name their awards for excellence “Edgars”. And, oh, yeh – Baltimore named its NFL team after Poe’s most famous poem.

In 2022, “The Pale Blue Eye”, a mystery starring Christian Bale was released and received mostly favorable reviews. Based on a 2006 novel by Louis Bayard, it is a fictional story about a detective investigating a murder at West Point in 1830. Frustrated by the cadets’ code of silence, the detective calls on cadet Edgar Allen Poe to help solve the mystery. Fittingly, the book was nominated for an Edgar.

Have a great weekend.