Though Poe's stories told of madness, Poe is now recognized as a genius who reinvented the Gothic tale of mystery and horror for his age. In stories like Tell-Tale Heart, The Fall of the House of Usher, and "Ligeia," Poe placed the reader inside the tortured minds and lives of people dealing with the supernatural.

His Life: Childhood

The infant Poe accompanied his mother on her ceaseless theatrical tours, watching from the wings as Elizabeth recreated her favorite roles from Shakespeare. Poe later remembered her as a princess in flowing white robes, ethereal in her beauty. On December 8, 1811, Elizabeth Poe, aged twenty-four, died from tuberculosis. "The small fairy-like figure of his mother wearing her best gown, her face white as wax after the hectic colour of her last days, illuminated by candles, an ultimate dream-lady deep in her mysterious sleep, remained one of the most haunting images of Poe's childhood," wrote biographer Mankowitz.

Poe was adopted by John and Frances Allan, a childless couple from Richmond, Virginia and went dramatically from rags to riches. John Allan was a prosperous merchant who dealt in tobacco, feed, farm animals, and slaves, and owned a large home in town. Though Frances Allan loved Edgar like her own child, his foster father, John Allan, was not as enthusiastic.

Poe was an "attractive and intelligent child", and he entertained his parents' guests by reciting long passages from poems. Though John Allan resisted the role of father, he was fiercely proud of the boy and took care to send him to the best schools money could buy. The Allan family moved to England to attend to business in 1815 and in 1818 Poe began to attend the Manor House boarding school in the village of Stoke Newington. Poe later described the school in the story "William Wilson": "My earliest recollections of a school life are connected with a large, rambling, Elizabethan house, in a misty-looking village of England, where a vast number of gigantic and gnarled trees stood, and where all the houses were excessively ancient. In truth, it was a dream-like and soothing place."

His Life: School and Teen Years

At the age of 14, Poe became devoted to Jane Stanard, the mother of a classmate. Poe was crushed to find that she was dying of a malignant brain tumor. Recasting Jane as Helen, Poe wrote one of his best early poems, called "To Helen." "In Edgar's mind," wrote LeVert, "beauty was now forever linked with death."

As Poe became increasingly romantic, dedicating his life to reading and writing, his adoptive father grew ever more critical. Describing Poe in a letter as "miserable, sulky, and ill-tempered," Allan was cold to Poe and constantly reminded him of the debt of gratitude he owed to the Allans. At the same time, Allan continued to provide for Poe, and in 1826 sent him to the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, but Poe soon ran himself into debt.

Worse than Poe's gambling was his drinking. Poe did not drink for pleasure; rather, he rushed headlong into a stupor, gulping alcohol as quickly as he could until he reached the point of oblivion. Once the excitement of the drink passed, Poe would often pass out.

Poe's drinking plagued him throughout his life, and eventually led to his death. But it is uncertain whether Poe was in fact an alcoholic. Following his youthful drinking binges, Poe drank only sporadically. Yet when he was depressed, as he was quite often in his life, he needed only a few drinks to push him over the edge. "Most biographers agree that Poe was a "problem" drinker, whose tumultuous temperament simply could not bear the exciting affects of drink."

Poe's foster father had had enough of his foster son's behavior in the winter of 1826 and 1827, and when he refused to pay Poe's debts, Poe was forced to withdraw from the university. Then, in March of 1827, Allan issued an ultimatum to Poe: live by my rules or leave. Poe left with only the clothes on his back and, as he later wrote in a letter begging for money, "not one cent in the world to provide any food." For the rest of his life, Poe would wander from job to job and city to city, looking for financial and emotional support, but also looking for some way to exercise his intellect and his churning imagination. It would be a long and frustrating journey.

His Life: On His Own

The life of an officer-in-training was not at all what Poe had expected. Instead of having leisure to read and write, Poe was kept busy from dawn to dusk, and he released his frustration by drinking large amounts of brandy. Miserable and again burdened by debts, Poe wrote to Allan and threatened to get himself ejected from West Point if he did not send money. Allan, again disgusted with Poe, sent no money and Poe made good on his word. He was court-martialed on January 28, 1831, on charges of gross neglect of duty and kicked out of the academy. Only 21 years old, Poe was on his own again and scrambling to make a living.

Also in 1831, John Allan remarried: two years after the death of his first wife. (Allan would die in 1834, making no mention of Poe in his will.) Poe's natural family--a paralyzed grandmother; an alcoholic, tubercular brother who soon died; and a hardy, loving aunt, Maria Clemm, and her two children, Henry, 13, and Virginia, 9--survived off the income left by Poe's grandfather's army pension and the meager earnings of Maria Clemm. Poe did little to contribute, but instead plunged once more into writing poetry. But when the Philadelphia Saturday Courier offered $100 to the author of the best short story, Poe left his beloved poetry to write a series of stories he called "Tales of the Folio Club."

The Poe House, Circa 1833 This engraving, made in the 1940s from an old photograph, shows the Baltimore Poe House as it probably appeared around 1833. Poe lived with Maria Clemm and her family in the right side of the house.

His Writings:

Poe's tales of horror include The Pit and the Pendulum. A Descent into the Maelstrom, The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) and (Right) The Masque of the Red Death (1842). A second group of Poe's tales includes those which feature, in graphically obsessive fashion, ominous or vengeful symbols of guilty conscience. These include The Black Cat, and (left) The Tell-Tale Heart. Other tales of terror include The Pit and the Pendulum, The Cask of Amontillado and the most effective of all doppelgänger stories, William Wilson.

Much of the remainder of Poe's supernatural fiction is humorous, although the comedy is edged with blackness in such tales as The Devil in the Belfry, The Duc de l'Omelette, "Bon-Bon and Never Bet the Devil Your Head, all of which employ the Devil as an ironic figure of fun.

There is, however, one further small subset of fantasies which can be related to present day horror fiction. These stories consist of tales that are quasi-scientific; the most famous one is The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, in which a mesmerized man is preserved from the decay which is supposed to follow death until released from his "trance," but Mesmeric Revelation is even more adventurous.

By 1841, Poe had begun writing a kind of story unlike any attempted in the history of fiction. The first one, The Murders in the Rue Morgue was the model for the modern detective story. It featured a brilliant detective named C. Auguste Dupin and his slow-minded companion to whom everything must be explained, Poe called his story a "tale of ratiocination," for it involved solving a crime through a rigorous process of rational thought and detection.

For four years, between 1841 and 1845, Poe wrote more of this type of story. Titles included The Mystery of Marie Roget, The Purloined Letter, and The Gold Bug. In each of these stories, the detective sifts through the available clues to try to arrive at the solution to the mystery.

Poe's detective tales are among his most well known. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who created Sherlock Holmes, the most famous detective in fiction, once said that Poe "was the father of the detective tale." In the twentieth century, many of Poe's detective stories were made into popular movies, for the suspense and the action of these stories transferred well to the screen. Poe himself thought less of these stories than of those that depended on creating and sustaining a mood, but these stories earned him an improved reputation and more money--$1200 a year--than he had ever earned before.

In January of 1845, Poe published the poem that would bring him his greatest fame, "The Raven." 'The Raven' portrays ... the monomaniacal obsession of a melancholy man who is hovering on the edge of madness," This melancholy man asks a raven perched upon his windowsill if he will meet his dead lover, Lenore, in the afterlife: Quoth the Raven, 'Nevermore!'"

The poem created an immediate sensation and made Poe a minor celebrity.'The Raven' was reprinted throughout the country and inspired a great number of imitations and parodies. One critic wrote that "Mr. Poe has attained an individual eminence in our literature, which he will keep. He has given proof of power and originality"

Thanks to Poe's breakthrough suspenseful short story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", the detective story is alive and well today, ____ 2 ____ millions of readers.

Poe is best known for his graphic works of horror, which still send ____ 3 ____ down our spines and make our blood run cold. "The Black Cat" and "The Tell-Tale Heart" are two of his most popular ____ 4 _____ . Both stories describe a character's chilling ____ 5 _____ into madness and eventually murder.

For years, ____ 6 ____ have disagreed about many of the facts of Poe's life, but most agree that his life was extremely difficult.

Soon after his father left, he died of tuberculosis. Poe's mother died one year later, and he was adopted by John and Frances Allan.

Poe's childhood with the Allans was happy, but he later ____ 8 ____ with them. His foster father eventually ____ 9 ____ Poe, leaving him penniless. This blow came just after his foster mother became another ____ 10 ____ of tuberculosis.

On October 3, 1849, Poe was found unconscious outside a tavern in Baltimore, Maryland. His fine clothing had been replaced with ill-fitting rags. Poe was rushed to a nearby ____ 13 ____, where he died four days later.

The death of Edgar Allan Poe was as ____ 14 ____as any death he had ____ 15 ____ in his own frightening stories. Doctors now believe he died of an advanced case of rabies, but no one knows for sure. The death of this great man of mystery remains a mystery itself.