Edgar Allan Poe - Liar, Cheat and Genius

by Read Listen Learn


Edgar Allan Poe - Master of Horror and Man of Evil Reputation

Edgar Allan Poe had an unfortunate start to life. Born in Boston in 1809, his father left home a year before his mother died, when the author was three years old. She left him only a painting of Boston. The little Edgar was sent to Virginia, where he was brought up by a wealthy farmer, John Allan, and his wife, Frances.

We do not know a great deal about his childhood, except that John Allan was a very strict believer in discipline but often spoilt the lad. In 1815, the family went to Britain, where Edgar was schooled in Scotland and London. In 1820, when Edgar was eleven, the family returned to Virginia.

John Allan became even richer in 1825, when his uncle died and left him land worth three quarters of a million dollars. That is an incredible amount of money in our day. This did not make him more generous to Edgar though, who went off the following year to study ancient and modern languages at the University of Virginia, but did not have enough money to pay for the course and buy the books he needed.

Although John Allan sent him more, Poe left the university after a single semester because he did not have enough to live on. It seems that he was gambling and could not pay his debts.

Poe next went to Boston, the city where he was born, and did various odd jobs – all of them temporary – until he joined the U.S. Army in 1827 as a private, the lowest rank of soldier. He lied about his age to do so. He did quite well in his military career, but it was still a short one. Although he was promoted and soon became a sergeant with more than double the pay that he had started with, he asked his commanding officer to leave before his three year service was complete. The officer would only agree if Poe made peace with John Allan, but his guardian refused his request to leave the Army.

Poe wrote again and again but John Allan did not answer his letters. He did not even let the teenager know that his wife, Frances, the woman who had taken care of him since he was a young child, had died in 1829. Poe only arrived back in Virginia the day after she was buried. At least, though, seeing Poe face to face made Allan agree he could leave the Army early, so that he could go to West Point Military Academy to train to be an officer. Once again, however, his career there did not last very long. Poe disliked the academy so much that he tried to get thrown out.

Poe published a few poems while he was at West Point, including a fictional account of the death of the Mongol leader, Tamerlane’s, lover. However, nobody paid any attention to them. Two more attempts to publish ended in failure too. To make matters worse, Poe’s elder brother, Henry, died (very young, of course) of alcoholism around this time.

In 1830, Poe, now a twenty-six year old without a secure job, secretly married his thirteen-year-old cousin. They lied about her age, saying that she was twenty. Poe got a job as a reporter, after winning a $50 prize for his first short story, ‘MS. Found in a Bottle’, from a newspaper in Baltimore. The story was a macabre sea story, written by a man whose ship has terribly bad luck on a voyage from Indonesia and who decides to write his adventures and put them in a bottle to be thrown over the side, so that people would learn of his death.

The following week Poe tried for the poetry prize of $25, offered by the same newspaper. In fact, a poem by the editor won. Poe was furious and had a fight in the street with the winner, saying that he only got the money because he worked for the paper. Many years later, one of the judges agreed that this was true.

Poe’s career in journalism made a name for him. His criticism of other authors’ work was acidic. He attacked one of the greatest living poets, called Longfellow, and said that his themes were copied and his poetry had no lasting value. This made him unpopular with other writers but sold a lot of newspapers. (Poe was not always nasty about other artists: he wrote that Dickens’ ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’ was an excellent work that would live as long as there were intelligent people to read it.) We can’t really say that Poe’s career in journalism was successful though. He often got drunk and was fired several times for not getting to work or arriving so drunk that he could not write.

Poe continued to try to get his short stories published but was told that the public only wanted longer work. By this time, Poe was hoping to live only by his writing, the first American author to do so. He was unsuccessful and spent his short life asking people for money just to put food on the table.

It was a bad time for writers. There was no international copyright law in America for foreign works – something that Dickens complained about on his first reading tour of America. This meant that newspapers and publishers paid nothing to non-American writers and so preferred them to local ones. What’s more, America was going into a recession which, in fact, lasted from 1837 to 1844. Although there were many journals and papers publishing stories and poems, they often paid authors very late, if they paid them at all.

In 1838, Poe published his first and only novel, another sea story with a supernatural theme. Later, Poe said that it was a worthless piece of work and, in fact, it sold very badly. However, the novel is, perhaps, more important for the influence it had, rather than as a well-composed piece of literature. Jules Verne, the French science fiction writer, wrote a sequel to it and many people have seen it as the first full work of science fiction because it mixes detail about technology with supernatural causes of events.

In 1840, Poe, who had no deep political opinions, pretended to share the ideals of President Tyler so he could get a job. Although his friend managed to arrange a meeting with the President for him, Poe did not go. He said he was ill, but others suggested he was drunk again.

In the meantime, not everything was going well at home. Poe’s much-loved wife began to show symptoms of tuberculosis, causing him to drink even more. In 1845, he sold a poem called ‘The Raven’ for nine dollars. It is about a young man who has just lost his love, Leonora, and is heartbroken. A raven taps on his window and answers ‘Nevermore’ to each of the young man’s questions, suggesting that he would never see his lover again in this life or the next. It was so popular that Poe became a household name and every great author seemed to read it, some liking it and others criticising it. But the fact was that it made Poe only nine dollars.

Poe tried to earn some more money than the nine dollars he got for the poem by publishing a description of his method in writing it. It sets out a strict and specific programme about how ‘The Raven’ was written. The difficulty with this is that Poe clearly had not followed his own methodology when he wrote it because, in many places, the poem is careless and has been quickly written.

Although Poe was continuing to sell short stories about very dark themes, many of them horror or supernatural, he was still not making any money. In 1847, his wife died.

Only two years later, Poe was found in another man’s clothes in the street. He was taken to hospital but died the next day. Two doctors saw him, one saying that he was drunk and the other that he was sober. In short, we do not know why he died. Perhaps, it was of alcoholic poisoning; maybe, it was a heart attack; others have said it was from cholera; and still others from a drug overdose.

The year after he died, a writer called Rufus Griswold published ‘Memoir of an Author’ about Poe’s life and death. It had several letters written by Poe that showed he was a drug addict, drunk and liar. These letters were later proved to be forgeries. But the myths about Poe – and some of them are very ugly – continue to this day.

He had many enemies and his life was not an innocent one by any means. He made matters worse by lying about his life, his family, his art, so often that it was hard to know when to believe him. All that we have left of Poe’s life these days is a collection of statements that contradict each other.

What we do know for certain, however, is that Poe’s stories of mystery and horror are still popular today. He is considered the father of the detective novel and even of science fiction. His writing has great style too and everyone accepts that he is one of America’s greatest authors.

The mystery surrounding Poe continued for many years even after his death, as each year on his birthday, three red roses and a bottle of brandy were left on his grave. Nobody knows who did this.