The Author

Poe was born in Boston in January 1809 to two travelling actors, and was orphaned before he turned three. John Allan, a Richmond merchant, took the boy in but never formally adopted him — a half-belonging that shadowed Poe's whole life, and gave him the middle name he'd carry into every byline.

He enrolled at the University of Virginia and later West Point, and left both — the first over gambling debts Allan refused to cover, the second by deliberately courting a court-martial once he'd decided the military life wasn't his. What came next was journalism: Poe became one of the era's sharpest magazine editors, sharper still as a critic, at the Southern Literary Messenger, Burton's, Graham's, and the Broadway Journal, building circulation everywhere he went and staying almost nowhere for long.

In 1836 he married his cousin Virginia Clemm. She was thirteen; he was twenty-seven, and by every account from those who knew them, devoted to her. Virginia's long decline from tuberculosis, and her death in 1847, sit under the late poems — "Annabel Lee" and "The Raven" both read differently once you know it. Poe outlived her by two years, dying in Baltimore in October 1849 under circumstances that have never been fully explained: found in distress, in clothes not his own, unable to account for the missing days before.

Poe died broke and was, for decades, remembered mostly through the hostile obituary of a rival — an account modern biographers have largely discredited. It was in France, through Baudelaire's translations, that his reputation was first taken seriously as literature rather than sensation.

His influence is now hard to overstate: the detective story runs from Poe's C. Auguste Dupin straight through to Sherlock Holmes; his theories of the short story's "single effect" still shape how the form is taught; and the tone he perfected — the unreliable narrator, confiding and unravelling in the same breath — remains the house style of American gothic horror.