Edgar Allan Poe

The name Poe reminds us of images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women coming back from the dead. Since 1827, his works have been in print, including literary classics such as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, and The Fall of the House of Usher. This versatile oeuvre of writers includes short stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a scientific theory book, and hundreds of essays and reviews of books. He is widely recogniz... ed as the inventor of modern detective story and an innovator in the genre of science fiction, but he made his first great literary critic and theoretician in America. Today's reputation for poes rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry. Just as the bizarre characters in Poes stories captured the imagination of the public, so Poe himself. He is seen in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or crumbling castles as a morbid, mysterious figure lurking. This is the legend's poe. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame the name of the authors. On January 19, 1809, the real Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston. Before his early death, his other brother William Henry Leonard Poe would also become a poet, and Poes sister Rosalie Poe would grow up to teach penmanship at a Richmond girls school. His parents had both died within three years of Poes' birth, and he was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia, while Poes' siblings went to live with other families. Mr. Allan would rear Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe had dreams of being an emulator of the British poet Lord Byron, his childhood hero. Early poetic verses found written in a young Poes handwriting on Allans ledger sheets reveal how little interest Poe had in the tobacco business. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_al for more information.READ MORE