Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer whose 19th-century body of work — including the poems "The Raven" and "Annabel Lee," and the short stories "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Fall of the House of Usher," and "The Cask of Amontillado" — made him one of the foundational figures of American Gothic literature, mystery fiction, and short-story craft. He was born Edgar Poe on January 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts. His parents were both touring actors; his father abandoned the family when Edgar was a year old, and his mother died of tuberculosis when he was two.

He was taken in by John and Frances Allan, a Richmond, Virginia merchant family — though never formally adopted — and used the name Edgar Allan Poe for the rest of his life. He attended the University of Virginia for one year before being forced to leave due to gambling debts. He served briefly in the US Army and at the United States Military Academy at West Point before being expelled in 1831.

His writing career through the 1830s and 1840s spanned poetry, short fiction, and literary criticism. He worked as an editor at multiple Philadelphia and Richmond literary magazines while publishing his own work. His 1841 short story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" — featuring the Parisian detective C. Auguste Dupin — is widely considered the foundational work of modern detective fiction. His 1845 poem "The Raven" — the "nevermore"-refrain narrative poem — became one of the most-celebrated American poems of the 19th century almost immediately upon publication and made Poe a literary celebrity for the final four years of his life.

Poe's life was marked by financial poverty, alcoholism, and personal tragedy. His young wife and first cousin Virginia Clemm — whom he married in 1836 when she was 13 — died of tuberculosis in 1847, an event that deepened his emotional and physical decline. His own death on October 7, 1849, in Baltimore at age 40, remains one of the most-disputed deaths in American literary history — he was found semi-conscious on a Baltimore street in clothes not his own and never recovered enough to explain what had happened. The cause of death has been variously attributed to alcoholism, syphilis, rabies, carbon-monoxide poisoning, and "cooping" (a 19th-century election-fraud practice in which voters were drugged and forced to vote multiple times).

His name Edgar is from the Old English Eadgar meaning "wealthy spearman." Edgar has been continuously among the most-popular American boys' names for over a century.