Edgar Allan Poe
January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849
Also known as: Edgar A. Perry
Edgar Allan Poe was an American romantic poet, novelist, literary theorist, and essayist. He was the author of usually fantastic and mystical stories and the founder of the detective and horror genres. He was able to masterfully capture the state of the person telling the story. Other works can be considered early science fiction, and several humorous stories come from his pen. With his work, he defined the form of modern American literature.
He was born on January 19, 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts. He was one of three children of a couple of traveling actors, Elizabeth and David Poe. His father suffered from alcoholism and left the family in 1810. His mother died of tuberculosis in 1811 at the age of 24, leaving behind three orphans: little Edgar, his mentally handicapped sister Rosalie, and brother William, who, like his father, fell into alcoholism and died prematurely.
As a three-year-old orphan, Edgar was entrusted to an orphanage in Richmond, where he was taken in by the Allan family, tobacco wholesalers, after a relatively short time; hence Poe"s middle name, Allan. The family lived in Liverpool for a time, and in 1815 Edgar was sent to a boarding school, first in Scotland, then in London. Mysterious England thus became a source of inspiration for young Edgar throughout his life. It gave his later works that fanciful, so typically Poe-like horror.
He gradually made a name for himself in literary circles as a successful storyteller. In his stories, he increasingly used elements of suspense and horror, characterized by a deep psychological analysis of the characters. The short stories The Pit and the Pendulum and The Golden Beetle, which were dramatized shortly after publication, were particularly popular with readers. In 1843, the Saturday Evening Post published his biography and likeness. In addition to his own work, Poe also devoted himself to literary theory, writing essays on poetic principles, writing methods, linguistic devices, and so on.
Poe"s death was worthy of the works he devoted himself to. He died under unclear circumstances. On October 3, 1849, he was found drunk (and apparently intoxicated) on a Baltimore sidewalk near Light Street. He was quickly hospitalized, but did not wake up from the coma into which he subsequently fell for four days. He died of a brain haemorrhage in the morning of October 7, 1849. The funeral at the Baltimore Presbyterian Cemetery was attended by four people. The tombstone, commissioned in 1860 by the poet"s cousin Neilson Poe, accidentally broke before it could be placed on the grave. In 1865, a collection was organized for a new tombstone with an epitaph commemorating his most famous poem, The Raven: Quoth the Raven, Nevermore.
He is the author of many short stories and poems. During Poe"s lifetime, an almost unknown work came to Europe mainly thanks to the translations of Charles Baudelaire and partly also Stéphane Mallarmé. Charles Baudelaire wrote of him: "From all that I have read, I am convinced that the United States was for Poe one great prison, and his inner, spiritual world as a poet or even a drinker was the only persistent effort to escape the influence of this loathsome atmosphere."
His work was an inspiration for many later authors (of whom we should mention perhaps the most famous Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his cult hero Sherlock Holmes, whose appearance is significantly influenced by Poe"s character of the exceptionally intelligent detective Dupin).
He left his mark not only on the French poets Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé, but also on Paul Valéry, Julius Verne (especially with the almost scientific accuracy of description) and, last but not least, on Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the aforementioned Arthur Conan Doyle. However, his true heir and successor was Howard Phillips Lovecraft, who continued on Poe's path to even more extreme corners of horror and loathing.
Even in modern literature, Poe is not entirely without influence. His influence is mainly present in British literature (he also influenced the widely popular work of Joanne Kathleen Rowling). Many of Poe"s works were not only dramatized, but also filmed and adapted into comic book form. Ray Bradbury, for example, was widely inspired by Poe"s literature, who, without hiding his adoration for Poe"s work, devoted an entire chapter from The Martian Chronicles to Poe"s personality (he synthesized two seemingly different elements from The Masque of the Red Death and The Pit and the Pendulum).