The life and mysterious death of Edgar Allan Poe
Poe's hard life from Richmond orphan to famous poet, what readers miss in The Tell-Tale Heart, and the unsolved mystery of his death in Baltimore.
Edgar Allan Poe gave us The Raven, the first modern detective story, and some of the most frightening tales ever written. His life was full of loss, and his death is still a mystery. Here is what the records tell us, and where the guessing begins.
An orphan in Richmond
Poe was born in Boston on 19 January 1809. His parents were travelling actors. His father left the family, and his mother, Eliza, died of tuberculosis in Richmond, Virginia, in December 1811, when Edgar was two.
A Richmond merchant, John Allan, and his wife Frances took the boy in, but John Allan never adopted him, and the two clashed for years. At the University of Virginia in 1826 Poe ran up gambling debts. In 1827 he left home, published a thin book of poems, Tamerlane, signed only "A Bostonian", and joined the army as "Edgar A. Perry". He later entered West Point, and was dismissed in 1831.
Virginia, poverty and fame
Poe found a home in Baltimore with his aunt, Maria Clemm, and her daughter Virginia. In May 1836 he married Virginia. He was 27 and she was 13, and by every account they were devoted.
Poe tried to live by his pen, moving between Richmond, Philadelphia and New York, and was poor nearly all his life. In 1841 he published The Murders in the Rue Morgue, with the detective C. Auguste Dupin: the first modern detective story, more than forty years before Sherlock Holmes. Early in 1842 Virginia showed the first signs of tuberculosis.
On 29 January 1845 the New York Evening Mirror printed The Raven, and Poe became famous almost overnight, but not rich. Virginia died in their little cottage at Fordham, outside New York, on 30 January 1847. She was 24.
The Tell-Tale Heart
Poe published The Tell-Tale Heart in January 1843 in The Pioneer, a Boston magazine. The first line sets the trap:
TRUE! — nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been, and am; but why will you say that I am mad?
He is an unreliable narrator: everything we learn comes through a mind we cannot trust. A few things readers often miss:
- He has no motive. He says so himself: "I loved the old man. He had never wronged me." It is only the eye, "a pale blue eye, with a film over it."
- His proof is a confession. He argues that a madman could not plan so carefully, then lists every careful step. Each proof of sanity makes his guilt worse.
- Whose heart is it? He is sure it is the old man's. But he hears it in the dark, terrified, and later from under the floor where a dead man lies. Many readers think it is his own pulse, or his conscience.
- He was never caught. The police find nothing. He gives himself up, because the sound will not stop.
A death no one can explain
On 27 September 1849 Poe left Richmond for Baltimore. For the next five days, no one knows where he was. On 3 October, election day, a man named Joseph Walker sent a note to Poe's acquaintance Dr. Joseph Snodgrass about a man in distress at Ryan's 4th Ward Polls, also called Gunner's Hall, a tavern being used as a polling place. It was Poe, barely conscious, in shabby clothes that were not his own. (The story that he was found in a gutter has no foundation.)
He was taken to Washington College Hospital, drifted in and out of delirium, and died there early on 7 October 1849, aged 40. No death certificate is known to survive. The main theories, none of them proved:
- Cooping. Gangs at election time were known to seize men, ply them with drink and march them from poll to poll to vote again and again. The date, the tavern and the strange clothes all fit.
- Alcohol. Snodgrass, a temperance man, was sure drink killed Poe. His hospital doctor, John Moran, later denied it.
- Rabies. In 1996 a cardiologist, R. Michael Benitez, argued that Poe's symptoms matched rabies. Critics note that the details he relied on come from Moran's later, altered accounts.
- A brain tumour. When Poe's remains were moved decades later, witnesses described a hard mass rattling in the skull. The writer Matthew Pearl has suggested it was a calcified tumour.
- Carbon monoxide or poisoning. In 1999 Albert Donnay proposed poisoning from coal-gas lighting. Tests on Poe's hair did not support it.
- Others. A beating on the road, tuberculosis, heart disease, cholera, epilepsy and even murder have all been suggested.
The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore concludes that his death must probably remain a mystery.
The Griswold slander
Two days after Poe died, the New York Tribune ran a cruel obituary signed "Ludwig". "Ludwig" was Rufus Griswold, a rival editor, who then became Poe's literary executor and in 1850 published a memoir painting him as a depraved, drunken madman. Later scholars showed that he had forged letters, but for a century his Poe was the one most people believed in.
The Poe Toaster
For decades, in the early hours of every 19 January, Poe's birthday, a stranger visited his original grave in Baltimore's Westminster Burying Ground, raised a toast, and left three roses and a part-finished bottle of cognac. First reported in print in 1950, the visits stopped after 2009, Poe's bicentenary. Since 2016 a new, anonymous "Toaster" chosen by the Maryland Historical Society has carried on the tribute.
Where to find Poe today
- Baltimore: the Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum on North Amity Street, and his grave at Westminster Burying Ground.
- Richmond: the Poe Museum, with his waistcoat, his pocket watch and a fragment of his coffin.
- Philadelphia: the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site, his only surviving home in the city where, the park service says, he spent his happiest and most productive years. Check before visiting, as it is sometimes closed for repairs.
- The Bronx: Poe Cottage on the Grand Concourse, his last home, where Virginia died.
Sources
- The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, Chronology of the Life of Edgar Allan Poe
- The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe
- The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, The Tell-Tale Heart (The Pioneer, January 1843)
- Edgar Allan Poe, The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume 2 (Project Gutenberg)
- National Geographic, Murder or madness: What really killed Edgar Allan Poe?
- Wikipedia, Death of Edgar Allan Poe
- Wikisource, "Death of Edgar Allan Poe" (the "Ludwig" obituary, New York Tribune, 9 October 1849)
- Wikipedia, Poe Toaster
- The Poe Museum, Richmond, poemuseum.org
- Poe Baltimore, The Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum
- National Park Service, Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site
- The Bronx County Historical Society, Edgar Allan Poe Cottage