Who is edgar allan poe

He began to publish more short stories and in landed an editorial position with the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond. Poe developed a reputation as a cut-throat critic, writing vicious reviews of his contemporaries. His scathing critiques earned him the nickname the "Tomahawk Man. His tenure at the magazine proved short. Poe's aggressive-reviewing style and sometimes combative personality strained his relationship with the publication, and he left the magazine in His problems with alcohol also played a role in his departure, according to some reports.

In , Poe moved to New York City. There, he published a news story in The New York Sun about a balloon trip across the Atlantic Ocean that he later revealed to be a hoax. His stunt grabbed attention, but it was his publication of "The Raven," in , which made Poe a literary sensation. That same year, Poe found himself under attack for his stinging criticisms of fellow poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Poe claimed that Longfellow, a widely popular literary figure, was a plagiarist, which resulted in a backlash against Poe.

Despite his success and popularity as a writer, Poe continued to struggle financially and he advocated for higher wages for writers and an international copyright law. From to , Poe lived in Baltimore, where his father was born, with his aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter, his cousin Virginia.

He began to devote his attention to Virginia, who became his literary inspiration as well as his love interest. The couple married in when she was only 13 years old. Poe was overcome by grief following her death, and although he continued to work, he suffered from poor health and struggled financially until his death in Poe self-published his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems , in As a critic at the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond from to , Poe published some of his own works in the magazine, including two parts of his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

In late s, Poe published Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque , a collection of short stories. In it, the narrator, a one-time animal lover, becomes an alcoholic who begins abusing his wife and black cat. The story was later included in the short story collection, Tales by Edgar Allan Poe. Later in his career, Poe continued to work in different forms, examining his own methodology and writing in general in several essays, including "The Philosophy of Composition," "The Poetic Principle" and "The Rationale of Verse.

Poe died on October 7, His final days remain somewhat of a mystery. Poe left Richmond on September 27, , and was supposedly on his way to Philadelphia. She was 13, he was This is an unlikely pairing and there is much debate about the nature of their relationship. Although many people today presume their relationship was familial, we ultimately will never know what happened in their marriage behind closed doors. Virginia and Maria had a stabilizing effect on Poe.

He seemed to be more responsible and happier during the years when they were with him. Starting in while living in Philadelphia, he enjoyed his prime years of literature. Poe was the first to write about an eccentric genius who solves mysterious crimes. Auguste Dupin, as the literary inspiration behind his character, Sherlock Holmes.

Poe was also an early pioneer of science fiction. Interestingly, the majority of his stories are comedies. Poe wrote in many genres, but his contribution to horror is what makes him famous today. Poe revolutionized the genre. He was one of the first to involve deep, intuitive, psychological horror. He often wrote stories where the true monster was the capacity for evil that is inside each person, and what happens when that evil is acted upon.

Poe was the first American writer to live completely off of his earnings from writing. Unfortunately, by this time, his wife Virginia began exhibiting symptoms of tuberculosis.

She was sick for several years and died in while the couple lived in New York. Virginia was 24 years old when she died. Poe never emotionally recovered from the death of his wife. It was evident that he relied on her for mental and emotional support.

Poe began to drift back south towards the city of his childhood: Richmond. Poe gave Walker the name of Joseph E. Snodgrass, a magazine editor with some medical training. Immediately, Walker penned Snodgrass a letter asking for help :. There is a gentleman, rather the worse for wear, at Ryan's 4th ward polls, who goes under the cognomen of Edgar A. On September 27—almost a week earlier—Poe had left Richmond, Virginia bound for Philadelphia to edit a collection of poems for Mrs.

Leon Loud, a minor figure in American poetry at the time. When Walker found Poe in delirious disarray outside of the polling place, it was the first anyone had heard or seen of the poet since his departure from Richmond. Poe never made it to Philadelphia to attend to his editing business.

Nor did he ever make it back to New York, where he had been living, to escort his aunt back to Richmond for his impending wedding. Poe was never to leave Baltimore, where he launched his career in the early 19th- century, again—and in the four days between Walker finding Poe outside the public house and Poe's death on October 7, he never regained enough consciousness to explain how he had come to be found, in soiled clothes not his own, incoherent on the streets.

Instead, Poe spent his final days wavering between fits of delirium, gripped by visual hallucinations. The night before his death, according to his attending physician Dr. John J. Moran, Poe repeatedly called out for " Reynolds "—a figure who, to this day, remains a mystery. Poe's death—shrouded in mystery—seems ripped directly from the pages of one of his own works.

He had spent years crafting a careful image of a man inspired by adventure and fascinated with enigmas—a poet, a detective, an author, a world traveler who fought in the Greek War of Independence and was held prisoner in Russia.

But though his death certificate listed the cause of death as phrenitis, or swelling of the brain, the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death have led many to speculate about the true cause of Poe's demise.

In , one of the first theories to deviate from either phrenitis or alcohol was published by biographer E. It is well known that a brain fever followed. As Eugene Didier wrote in his article, "The Grave of Poe," that while in Baltimore, Poe ran into some friends from West Point, who prevailed upon him to join them for drinks. Poe, unable to handle liquor, became madly drunk after a single glass of champagne, after which he left his friends to wander the streets.

In his drunken state, he "was robbed and beaten by ruffians, and left insensible in the street all night. Others believe that Poe fell victim to a practice known as cooping , a method of voter fraud practiced by gangs in the 19th century where an unsuspecting victim would be kidnapped, disguised and forced to vote for a specific candidate multiple times under multiple disguised identities.

Voter fraud was extremely common in Baltimore around the mid s, and the polling site where Walker found the disheveled Poe was a known place that coopers brought their victims. The fact that Poe was found delirious on election day, then, is no coincidence. Over the years, the cooping theory has come to be one of the more widely accepted explanations for Poe's strange demeanor before his death.

Before Prohibition, voters were given alcohol after voting as a sort of reward; had Poe been forced to vote multiple times in a cooping scheme, that might explain his semi-conscious, ragged state. Around the late s, Poe's biographer J. Ingram received several letters that blamed Poe's death on a cooping scheme. A letter from William Hand Browne, a member of the faculty at Johns Hopkins, explains that "the general belief here is, that Poe was seized by one of these gangs, his death happening just at election-time; an election for sheriff took place on Oct.

His sister had the same problem; it seems to be something hereditary. Months before his death, Poe became a vocal member of the temperance movement , eschewing alcohol, which he'd struggled with all his life. Poe," an event, toward the end of Poe's time in Richmond, that might be relevant to theorists that prefer a "death by drinking" demise for Poe.