America’s first full-time writer invented detective fiction
Edgar Allan Poe turned short stories into a paying craft, helped invent detective fiction, and nudged early science fiction—while rarely escaping debt. His raven poem made him famous in 1845; four years later he died in Baltimore at forty, cause still unknown.
Born in Boston on 19 January 1809 to actors David and Eliza Poe, he was orphaned young after his father left and his mother died of tuberculosis. Richmond merchant John Allan and his wife Frances took him in without formal adoption. He had an older brother, Henry, and a younger sister, Rosalie, and his grandfather had come to America from County Cavan in Ireland. Schooling included stretches in Scotland and London before a return to Virginia. Short stories were his main commercial craft, and living by the pen alone kept him chronically short of money.
One year at the University of Virginia ended in money fights and gambling debts with Allan. In 1827 he enlisted as Edgar A. Perry and issued Tamerlane and Other Poems as “a Bostonian.” After Frances Allan died in 1829 he briefly made peace with John Allan, but he flunked out of West Point as an officer cadet, announced he would live as a poet, and broke with his guardian for good. Years of magazine criticism and fiction followed across Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. In 1836, at twenty-seven, he married cousin Virginia Clemm, then thirteen; she died of tuberculosis in 1847.
January 1845 brought instant success with the raven poem. He never launched his planned journal The Stylus. Death in Baltimore in 1849 remains unexplained—disease, alcohol, other drugs, and suicide have all been proposed. The Mystery Writers of America later named its Edgar Award for him, and several of his homes are now museums. His influence stretched well beyond fiction, reaching even cosmology and cryptography.
Source: Edgar Allan Poe
