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Daguerreotype portrait of Edgar Allan Poe, June 1849
Daguerreotype, June 1849 · restored by Yann Forget and Adam Cuerden · public domain · Wikimedia Commons

Historical voices

Edgar Allan Poe

1809–1849

Poet and master of the macabre; a pioneer of the detective story.

Born
19 January 1809 · Boston, Massachusetts
Died
7 October 1849 · Baltimore, Maryland
Nationality
American
  • Gothic
  • horror
  • detective fiction
  • poetry
  • short story

A reference author. Valice Press has no connection with Edgar Allan Poe, their publishers or their estate. Edgar Allan Poe appears here as part of the reading context around the shelf.

Biography

The life, briefly

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston to actor parents, orphaned before he was three, and raised in Richmond, Virginia, by the Allan family, who never formally adopted him. He left the University of Virginia after a year for want of money and published his first book of poems anonymously in 1827.

He turned to prose and earned what living he could from magazines as critic, editor and contributor, moving between Richmond, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York. He is generally counted the first well-known American writer to try to live by writing alone, which is much of the reason his life was so short of money.

Works

Major works

  1. 1827Tamerlane and Other Poemshis first book, credited only to "a Bostonian"
  2. 1838The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantuckethis only novel
  3. 1839The Fall of the House of Usher
  4. 1841The Murders in the Rue Morgueoften named as the first modern detective story
  5. 1843The Tell-Tale Heart
  6. 1845The Ravenan instant success
  7. 1848Eureka: A Prose Poem

Timeline

Turning points

  1. 1827

    Published Tamerlane and Other Poems; enlisted in the US Army the same year under the name Edgar A. Perry.

  2. 1835

    Became assistant editor of the Southern Literary Messenger; he left in January 1837.

  3. 1841

    Published "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", introducing the detective C. Auguste Dupin.

  4. 1845

    "The Raven" appeared in January and made his name.

  5. 1847

    His wife Virginia died of tuberculosis.

  6. 1849

    Died in Baltimore at forty, in circumstances that have never been settled.

Why they are here

Edgar Allan Poe and the shelf

Relevance

Poe wrote the stories that horror, detective fiction and early science fiction still borrow from. His tales of premature burial, revenge and the double are the bridge between the Gothic novel and the modern short story.

Influence

He is widely regarded as a central figure of American Romanticism and Gothic fiction in the United States, and as one of the pioneers of the detective genre. Arthur Conan Doyle said that each of Poe's detective stories was a root from which a whole literature had developed.

Related authors

Read alongside

Sources

Where this comes from

Everything on this page about Edgar Allan Poe is written from these sources, not from memory. Their dates and key claims were checked against the sources on 8 October 2026.The life dates are compared across Wikidata and the Library of Congress’s authority records.