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    Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was an American writer, poet, editor and literary critic. He is considered a key figure in 19th century American literature. Poe introduced genres like detective fiction, science fiction and Gothic horror to American audiences. While he was recognized as an original American writer in Europe during his lifetime, it was not until the latter half of the 20th century that Poe came to be viewed as an important contributor to the American Renaissance movement in literature. The tragic circumstances of Poe's life, including the early deaths of his parents and turbulent relationship with his guardian, influenced his often dark and macabre works.

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    Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was an American writer, poet, editor and literary critic. He is considered a key figure in 19th century American literature. Poe introduced genres like detective fiction, science fiction and Gothic horror to American audiences. While he was recognized as an original American writer in Europe during his lifetime, it was not until the latter half of the 20th century that Poe came to be viewed as an important contributor to the American Renaissance movement in literature. The tragic circumstances of Poe's life, including the early deaths of his parents and turbulent relationship with his guardian, influenced his often dark and macabre works.

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    Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was an American writer, poet, editor and literary critic. He is considered a key figure in 19th century American literature. Poe introduced genres like detective fiction, science fiction and Gothic horror to American audiences. While he was recognized as an original American writer in Europe during his lifetime, it was not until the latter half of the 20th century that Poe came to be viewed as an important contributor to the American Renaissance movement in literature. The tragic circumstances of Poe's life, including the early deaths of his parents and turbulent relationship with his guardian, influenced his often dark and macabre works.

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    Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was an American writer, poet, editor and literary critic. He is considered a key figure in 19th century American literature. Poe introduced genres like detective fiction, science fiction and Gothic horror to American audiences. While he was recognized as an original American writer in Europe during his lifetime, it was not until the latter half of the 20th century that Poe came to be viewed as an important contributor to the American Renaissance movement in literature. The tragic circumstances of Poe's life, including the early deaths of his parents and turbulent relationship with his guardian, influenced his often dark and macabre works.

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    E dgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809, and died on October 7, 1849. In his stormy forty
    years, which included a marriage to his cousin, fights with other writers, and legendary drinking
    binges, Poe lived in all the important literary centers of the northeastern United States:
    Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston. He was a magazine editor, a poet, a short
    story writer, a critic, and a lecturer. He introduced the British horror story, or the Gothic genre, to
    American literature, along with the detective story, science fiction, and literary criticism. Poe
    became a key figure in the nineteenth-century flourishing of American letters and literature.
    Famed twentieth--century literary critic F.O. Matthiessen named this period the American
    Renaissance. He argued that nineteenth-century American writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry
    David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman crafted a distinctly
    American literature that attempts to escape from the long shadow of the British literary tradition.
    Matthiessen paid little attention to Edgar Allan Poe. Although he long had a reputation in Europe
    as one of America’s most original writers, only in the latter half of the -twentieth century has Poe
    been viewed as a crucial contributor to the American Renaissance.

    The often tragic circumstances of Poe’s life haunt his writings. His father disappeared not long
    after the child’s birth, and, at the age of three, Poe watched his mother die of tuberculosis. Poe
    then went to live with John and Frances Allan, wealthy theatergoers who knew his parents, both
    actors, from the Richmond, Virginia, stage. Like Poe’s mother, Frances Allan was chronically ill,
    and Poe experienced her sickness much as he did his mother’s. His relationship with John Allan,
    who was loving but moody, generous but demanding, was emotionally turbulent. With Allan’s
    financial help, Poe attended school in England and then enrolled at the University of Virginia in
    1826, but he was forced to leave after two semesters. Although Poe blamed Allan’s stinginess,
    his own gambling debts played a large role in his fiscal woes. A tendency to cast blame on
    others, without admitting his own faults, characterized Poe’s relationship with many people,
    most significantly Allan. Poe struggled with a view of Allan as a false father, generous enough to
    take him in at age three, but never dedicated enough to adopt him as a true son. There are echoes
    of Poe’s upbringing in his works, as sick mothers and guilty fathers appear in many of his tales.

    After leaving the University of Virginia, Poe spent some time in the military before he used his
    contacts in Richmond and Baltimore to enter the magazine industry. With little experience, Poe
    relied on his characteristic bravado to convince Thomas Willis White, then head of the fledgling
    Southern Literary Messenger, to take him on as an editor in 1835. This position gave him a
    forum for his early tales, including “Berenice” and “Morella.” The Messenger also established
    Poe as a leading and controversial literary critic, who often attacked his New England
    counterparts—especially poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—in the genteel pages of the
    magazine. Poe ultimately fell out of favor with White, but his literary criticism made him a
    popular speaker on the lecture circuit. Poe never realized his most ambitious dream—the launch
    of his own magazine, the Stylus. Until his death, he believed that the New England literary
    establishment had stolen his glory and had prevented the Stylus from being published.

    1
    His name has since become synonymous with macabre tales like “The Tell-Tale Heart,” but Poe
    assumed a variety of literary personas during his career. The Messenger—as well as Burton’s
    Gentleman’s Magazine and Graham’s—established Poe as one of America’s first popular
    literary critics. He advanced his theories in popular essays, including “The Philosophy of
    Composition” (1846), “The Rationale of Verse” (1848), and “The Poetic Principle.” In “The
    Philosophy of Composition” Poe explained how he had crafted “The Raven,” the 1845 poem that
    made him nationally famous. In the pages of these magazines, Poe also introduced of a new form
    of short fiction—the detective story—in tales featuring the Parisian crime solver C. Auguste
    Dupin. The detective story follows naturally from Poe’s interest in puzzles, word games, and
    secret codes, which he loved to present and decode in the pages of the Messenger to dazzle his
    readers. The word “detective” did not exist in English at the time that Poe was writing, but the
    genre has become a fundamental mode of twentieth-century literature and film. Dupin and his
    techniques of psychological inquiry have informed countless sleuths, including Sir Arthur Conan
    Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe.

    Gothic literature, a genre that rose with Romanticism in Britain in the late eighteenth century,
    explores the dark side of human experience—death, alienation, nightmares, ghosts, and haunted
    landscapes. Poe brought the Gothic to America. American Gothic literature dramatizes a culture
    plagued by poverty and slavery through characters afflicted with various forms of insanity and
    melancholy. Poe, America’s foremost southern writer before William Faulkner, generated a
    Gothic ethos from his own experiences in Virginia and other slaveholding territories, and the
    black and white imagery in his stories reflects a growing national anxiety over the issue of
    slavery.

    In the spectrum of American literature, the Gothic remains in the shadow of the dominant genre
    of the American Renaissance—the Romance. Popularized by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Romantic
    literature, like Gothic literature, relies on haunting and mysterious narratives that blur the
    boundary between the real and the fantastic. Poe’s embrace of the Gothic with its graphic
    violence and disturbing scenarios places him outside the ultimately conservative and traditional
    resolutions of Romantic novels such as Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851).

    In Romances like the novels of Hawthorne, conflicts occur among characters within the context
    of society and are resolved in accordance with society’s rules. Poe’s Gothic tales are brief flashes
    of chaos that flare up within lonely narrators living at the fringes of society. Poe’s longest work,
    the 1838 novel Arthur Gordon Pym, described in diary form a series of episodes on a journey to
    Antarctica. A series of bizarre incidents and exotic discoveries at sea, Pym lacks the cohesive
    elements of plot or quest that tie together most novels and epics and is widely considered an
    artistic failure. Poe’s style and concerns never found their best expression in longer forms, but
    his short stories are considered masterpieces worldwide. The Poe’s Gothic is a potent brew, best
    served in small doses.

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