99 Fun Facts About Edgar Allan Poe

In which city was Edgar Allan Poe born in 1809?

Boston was Poe's birthplace on January 19, 1809; his mother Eliza left him a picture inscribed to her little son Edgar, 'who should ever love Boston, the place of his birth'.

What was the profession of both of Poe's parents?

Actors both: David Poe Jr. and Eliza Arnold Poe toured with stage companies, and Eliza's death in Richmond late in 1811 left Edgar parentless before his third birthday.

From whom did Edgar Poe take the middle name Allan?

His foster father, Richmond merchant John Allan, took Edgar in at the end of 1811 and gave him the name, yet never legally adopted him and left him out of his will.

Poe left the University of Virginia after one year, chiefly because of what?

Gambling debts ended his studies: Poe said he was sent with too little money for his fees, his losses at cards mounted, and when they went unpaid he left Charlottesville at the end of 1826.

Under what assumed name did Poe enlist in the US Army in 1827?

Edgar A. Perry was the name Poe gave the Army on May 26, 1827, adding four years to his age to enlist as a 22-year-old clerk; he was posted first to Fort Independence.

Which horror star led Roger Corman's 1960s Poe films, including House of Usher and The Pit and the Pendulum?

Vincent Price starred in all but one of Roger Corman's eight Poe films, from House of Usher (1960) to The Tomb of Ligeia (1964); the low-budget hits made him a cult figure with young audiences.

Which book, Poe's first, appeared anonymously in 1827 and survives in only about a dozen copies?

Tamerlane and Other Poems sank so completely that its very existence was later doubted; no copy surfaced for decades.

What rank did Poe reach during his two years in the US Army?

Sergeant major, the top rank open to an enlisted man, was his from January 1829; within months he wanted out and had to supply a substitute to serve the rest of his five-year term.

How did Poe engineer his exit from the US Military Academy at West Point in 1831?

A deliberate court-martial did it: Poe stopped attending drills, classes and chapel until West Point tried and dismissed him, and his fellow cadets still chipped in to fund his next book.

Poe married 13-year-old Virginia Clemm in 1836; how were the two already related?

First cousins: Virginia was the daughter of Poe's aunt Maria Clemm, who thus became his mother-in-law too and shared the couple's home until Virginia's death.

What disease killed Virginia Poe in 1847?

Virginia died of tuberculosis on January 30, 1847, aged 24; the first sign had come in January 1842 when a blood vessel burst in her throat as she sang at the piano.

In which New York City borough is the cottage where Virginia died and Poe wrote his last poems?

The Bronx now surrounds Poe Cottage, but when the family rented it in 1846 Fordham was a country village a few miles outside New York; the county historical society runs it as a museum.

Which magazine in his boyhood home city hired Poe in 1835, then briefly let him go over his drinking?

Southern Literary Messenger owner Thomas W. White dropped Poe within weeks of hiring him in Richmond, then took him back with a written warning that the job would end 'the moment you get drunk'.

What did Poe rename the magazine he planned for years to launch, first called The Penn?

The Stylus kept the pun on 'pen' while shedding a name that sounded too tied to Pennsylvania; Poe hunted backers and subscribers for it until he died, and it never printed an issue.

Which famous American poet did Poe publicly accuse of plagiarism, in an 1845 feud remembered as a 'War'?

H. W. Longfellow never answered Poe's attacks in public; friends took up his defence instead.

What mocking nickname did Poe give the transcendentalists, after a pond on a New England common?

Frog-Pondians was his jab at Emerson's circle; he wrote that he had no patience whatever with 'the mystics for mysticism's sake'.

Which animated series retold Poe's The Raven in its first Halloween special, with James Earl Jones narrating?

The Simpsons closed its first Treehouse of Horror in 1990 with the poem, casting Homer as the mourner and Bart as the bird; Poe shares the segment's writing credit.

Which pseudonym, shared with a 17th-century English poet, signed The Raven in The American Review?

Quarles was the byline in The American Review's February 1845 issue, but the disguise was wasted: the Evening Mirror had already run the poem under Poe's own name as an advance copy.

The talking raven in The Raven was partly inspired by a bird in which Charles Dickens novel?

Grip, the talking raven in Barnaby Rudge (1841), was modelled on Dickens's own pet bird; Poe reviewed the novel and complained that its raven should have served a more prophetic purpose.

In The Raven, the bird perches on a bust of which goddess?

The raven perches 'upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door'; Pallas Athena, Greek goddess of wisdom, underlines the scholarly setting of the narrator's chamber.

What is the name of the lost love the narrator of The Raven is mourning?

Lenore is the 'rare and radiant maiden' he mourns; Poe later wrote that he picked the theme because the death of a beautiful woman is 'the most poetical topic in the world'.

In which month is The Raven set?

December is the month the speaker recalls, 'the bleak December' of dying embers; Poe said he made the night stormy so that a bird would have reason to seek shelter indoors.

What phrase closes The Raven's opening stanza?

Nothing more closes six of the first seven stanzas, as the speaker tells himself the tapping is only a visitor or the wind; the bird's one word then owns the rhyme for the last eleven.

In which essay did Poe describe the method he claimed to have used to write The Raven?

In The Philosophy of Composition (1846), Poe claimed he built The Raven backwards from its climax, choosing 'Nevermore' for its long o and r sounds, presenting the poem as cold calculation rather than inspiration.

Which 1841 Poe story is generally credited as the first modern detective story?

The Murders in the Rue Morgue, published in Graham's Magazine in April 1841, introduced C. Auguste Dupin, whose 'ratiocination' set the pattern for Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot.

Which animal turns out to be the killer in the first case of Poe's detective Dupin?

An orangutan that escaped from a sailor did it; Dupin works that out from a tuft of non-human hair and the strength the killings took, then advertises for the animal's owner.

In which city does Poe's detective C. Auguste Dupin operate?

Paris is home to Dupin, who shares a crumbling mansion in the Faubourg Saint-Germain with the narrator; the pair shutter the windows by day and roam the streets only after dark.

In The Tell-Tale Heart, what feature of the old man drives the narrator to murder?

His pale blue eye, filmed over like a vulture's, torments the narrator into killing him; he then gives himself away to the police when he thinks he hears the dead man's heart still beating.

In Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, where does the narrator hide the old man's body?

Under the floorboards of the old man's own room: the narrator lifts three planks, hides the remains, then sets chairs for the police right above the spot until his nerve gives way.

What are the names of the twin siblings in The Fall of the House of Usher?

Roderick and Madeline Usher are the last of their line; Madeline suffers cataleptic, deathlike trances, and Roderick entombs her in a vault while she is alive.

What does the narrator notice running from the roof of the House of Usher down into the tarn?

A thin crack, barely perceptible, zigzags from the roof down into the tarn; at the story's end that fissure widens and the mansion splits in two, sinking into the water.

In The Cask of Amontillado, what is the name of the man Montresor walls up alive?

Montresor lures Fortunato into the catacombs with the promise of Amontillado and bricks him into a niche; the closing line reveals that for half a century no mortal has disturbed the bones.

The Cask of Amontillado first appeared in November 1846 in which unlikely publication?

Godey's Lady's Book, a magazine for women, was an odd home for a tale of a man walled up alive: its victim, dressed as a carnival jester, answers the last brick with only a jingle of his cap's bells.

In The Masque of the Red Death, what stands in the seventh room?

An ebony clock stands against the west wall of the black room; each time it strikes, the music stops and the dancers falter, and its twelve strokes at midnight bring the masked stranger.

The narrator of The Pit and the Pendulum is a prisoner of which institution?

The narrator has been condemned by the Spanish Inquisition at Toledo; he is saved at the last moment when the French army under General Lasalle captures the city.

How does the narrator of The Pit and the Pendulum escape the descending blade?

Rats chew through his bonds after he smears the strap with the remains of spiced meat left beside him; he slips free moments before the blade reaches his chest.

What is the name of the cat in The Black Cat?

Pluto shares his name with the Roman god of the underworld; the night after the narrator hangs him, the house burns down, and the one wall left standing bears the shape of a cat in a noose.

In Poe's prize-winning tale The Gold-Bug, a cipher leads the hero to which pirate's buried treasure?

Captain Kidd's hoard is the prize: Legrand spots hidden writing on a scrap of parchment, solves its cipher and digs up the chest; the tale itself won a $100 newspaper prize in 1843.

The Gold-Bug is set at which South Carolina location, where Poe himself had served in the Army in 1827?

Sullivan's Island was Poe's post for a year as a soldier at Fort Moultrie; fifteen years on he gave Legrand a hut in its myrtle thickets, with the fort at the island's western tip.

Which is Poe's only complete novel?

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), a sea voyage toward the South Pole, is the one novel he finished; six decades later Jules Verne wrote a sequel, An Antarctic Mystery.

Poe's 1848 prose poem Eureka is remembered for anticipating which scientific idea by 80 years?

The Big Bang theory is foreshadowed in Eureka's universe bursting from one 'primordial particle'; Poe thought it his greatest work, but his publisher did not share the faith and printed only a few hundred copies.

Which Poe poem, the last he completed, mourns a maiden in 'a kingdom by the sea'?

Annabel Lee was written in 1849 and printed only after Poe's death that year; it is usually read as mourning his wife Virginia, though his boyhood sweetheart Elmira Royster said it was hers.

Poe popularised which unusual word for the ringing of bells in his poem The Bells?

Tintinnabulation, from the Latin for a bell, rings out once in the poem's opening stanza of sleigh bells; dictionaries date the word to the 1820s or 1830s, so Poe made it famous but did not coin it.

What was 'cooping', which one theory blames for Poe's death in 1849?

A form of election fraud: gangs seized bystanders, held them in a room called the coop, plied them with drink and marched them from poll to poll; Poe was found on election day at a tavern used for voting.

What name did Poe reportedly call out repeatedly on the night before he died?

Dr John Moran, his attending physician, reported that Poe called out 'Reynolds' through the night of October 6, 1849; nobody has established whom he meant, though the explorer Jeremiah N. Reynolds is one guess.

Under what pen name did Rufus Griswold publish his slanted obituary of Poe in 1849?

Signing himself 'Ludwig', Griswold opened his New-York Tribune obituary with 'Edgar Allan Poe is dead... few will be grieved by it', then claimed to be Poe's chosen literary executor and smeared him further with forged letters.

Which US pro sports league has a team named after a Poe poem?

The NFL's Baltimore Ravens were named by fans in a 1996 newspaper phone poll, where Ravens beat Americans and Marauders; the poet is buried in the city.

What did the mysterious 'Poe Toaster' leave at Poe's grave each January 19 for decades?

Cognac and three roses appeared on the grave each birthday from at least 1949; a 1999 note said the first Toaster had died, successors carried on, and after the 2009 bicentennial the visits stopped.

Which director said he began making suspense films because he liked Edgar Allan Poe's stories?

Alfred Hitchcock said: 'It's because I liked Edgar Allan Poe's stories so much that I began to make suspense films'; H. P. Lovecraft, for his part, called Poe his 'God of Fiction'.

Which French poet translated Poe's tales and Eureka into French?

Charles Baudelaire said he translated Poe so patiently because the American resembled him; he claimed to find in Poe's pages ideas already in his own head.

Which 1831 Poe poem was inspired by Jane Stanard, the mother of a school friend?

To Helen, first printed in his 1831 Poems, was for Jane Stanard, a schoolmate's mother; Poe later said he wrote the lines in boyhood to 'the first, purely ideal love of my soul'.

As a teenage honor guard in Richmond in 1824, Poe helped welcome which visiting hero of the American Revolution?

Marquis de Lafayette toured Richmond in 1824 with the 15-year-old Poe as a lieutenant of the junior honor guard; one stop was the Old Stone House, which 98 years later became the Poe Museum.

Which New York newspaper printed Poe's 1844 'Balloon-Hoax' about a three-day Atlantic crossing?

The Sun sold Poe's invented report of Monck Mason's 75-hour balloon crossing as real news; by Poe's own account, the rush for 'the sole paper which had the news' was beyond even the prodigious.

Poe was one of the first American writers to attempt what?

Poe tried to live solely by writing, with no family money or second profession to fall back on, which meant near-constant financial difficulty and dependence on magazine fees.

Which Poe story won a prize from the Baltimore Saturday Visiter in October 1833?

MS. Found in a Bottle took the Saturday Visiter's $50 prize in October 1833; judge John P. Kennedy became Poe's patron and steered him toward Thomas W. White's Richmond magazine.

What is the title of Poe's only drama?

Politian, a blank-verse tragedy set in 16th-century Rome but based on Kentucky's 1825 Beauchamp-Sharp murder, is Poe's only play; he left it unfinished, printing scenes in 1835-36.

In which US president's administration did Poe try to win a Custom House post in 1842?

John Tyler was president in 1842, when Poe hoped for a clerkship at the Philadelphia Custom House that would leave him time to write; Tyler's son Robert backed him, through Poe's friend Frederick W. Thomas, but no post came.

After his wife's death, Poe courted the poet Sarah Helen Whitman, who lived in which city?

Sarah Helen Whitman lived in Providence, Rhode Island, where Poe courted her in 1848 and lectured on 'The Poetic Principle'; the engagement collapsed late that year after he broke a pledge not to drink.

Which US Army cryptologist, hooked by The Gold-Bug as a boy, led the team that broke Japan's PURPLE cipher?

William Friedman, who first met cryptography in The Gold-Bug as a child, headed the Army Signal Intelligence Service team that cracked PURPLE in 1940; Poe himself had solved readers' ciphers in a Philadelphia weekly.

Which talking bird did Edgar Allan Poe say he first thought of before choosing a raven for his poem?

A parrot was the first creature that suggested itself, Poe wrote, since all he needed was an animal able to repeat one word. A raven replaced it as far better suited to a gloomy poem.

Which actor narrated Poe's The Raven in the first Simpsons Treehouse of Horror, with Bart as the bird?

James Earl Jones read the poem while Homer played the grieving narrator and Marge appeared in a portrait as the lost love. Matt Groening feared the segment would look pretentious.

Which fictional detective, in his 1887 debut, dismisses Poe's sleuth Dupin as showy and decidedly inferior?

Sherlock Holmes scoffs at Dupin in A Study in Scarlet, yet he later plays the same thought-reading trick on Watson. Arthur Conan Doyle himself said Poe breathed life into the detective story.

Which pen name did Japan's Tarō Hirai adopt for his mystery stories as a tribute to Edgar Allan Poe?

Edogawa Ranpo, said quickly, sounds like Edgar Allan Poe. He made his debut in 1923, and the boy sleuth of the manga Detective Conan takes the alias Edogawa Conan in his honour.

When Edgar Allan Poe was found delirious days before his death, what was odd about the clothes he wore?

They were not his own, it is believed: the shabby, ill-fitting outfit was out of character for so careful a dresser. Poe was never coherent long enough to say how he came to be wearing it.

In Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven, which single word is the bird's only answer to every question?

Nevermore is the only word the raven knows, and the narrator guesses it was picked up from some unhappy former master. He keeps asking anyway, each question more painful than the last.

Which horror star led most of Roger Corman's 1960s Poe films, from House of Usher to The Tomb of Ligeia?

Vincent Price carried the series after House of Usher took over $2 million at the US box office. An admirer of the author, he later posed with the stuffed raven at Richmond's Poe Museum.

In Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, where does the narrator hide the old man's body before the police call?

Under the floorboards is where he conceals the dismembered body, and he then sets his own chair on the very spot while the officers sit and chat. He confesses when he thinks he hears the heart still beating.

In Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, what terrible fate does the host's twin sister suffer?

She is entombed alive in the vault beneath the house, and her brother admits he has heard her stirring for days. She breaks out, bloodied, and appears at the bedroom door.

In Poe's The Gold-Bug, a cracked cipher leads William Legrand to the buried treasure of which real pirate?

Captain Kidd's chest turns up beside two skeletons, which Legrand takes for crewmen killed to keep the secret. Poe had heard Kidd legends as a young soldier on the Carolina coast.

At what hour does Poe's The Raven open, with a grieving scholar dozing over old books by a dying fire?

Midnight on a stormy winter night was a calculated choice: Poe said the bird flies in simply to shelter from the weather. Its black feathers were meant to stand out against a white bust.

Which Beatles song from 1967 mentions Edgar Allan Poe by name in one of its verses?

I Am the Walrus name-checks him in passing. That same year the band put Poe's face in the crowd on the front cover of their album Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Which actor played Edgar Allan Poe hunting a copycat killer in the 2012 thriller The Raven?

John Cusack's Poe spends his final days helping the police chase a serial killer whose crimes mirror those in his own stories. The plot is invented, though it borrows from accounts of his mysterious death.

Which horror director created Netflix's 2023 miniseries The Fall of the House of Usher from Poe's tales?

Mike Flanagan recast the Ushers as the family behind a corrupt drug company and gave them a shapeshifting tormentor called Verna, whose name is an anagram of raven.

Which French novelist wrote An Antarctic Mystery in 1897 as a sequel to Edgar Allan Poe's only novel?

Jules Verne sent a new ship south from the Kerguelen Islands on the trail of Poe's lost voyagers. Neither writer had ever seen that remote archipelago.

Which name did Poe give a sailor eaten by shipmates, decades before a real cabin boy so named met that fate?

Richard Parker draws the short straw in Poe's 1838 novel, and in 1884 the starving crew of the yacht Mignonette ate a cabin boy of the same name. Yann Martel later gave the name to the tiger in Life of Pi.

Which Poe tale of a man stalked by his exact double draws on the author's own schooldays near London?

William Wilson meets a schoolmate with his name, his looks and even Poe's own birthday, January 19. Their headmaster shares his name with Poe's real one, the Reverend John Bransby.

Poe's A Descent into the Maelström is set at a vast whirlpool off the Lofoten coast of which country?

Norway's real Moskstraumen current inspired the tale, in which a fisherman survives by clinging to a barrel. He says the terror turned his black hair white in less than a day.

In Poe's The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, what is done to a dying man to hold off death?

He is hypnotised at the moment of death and lingers for months, still answering from the trance. Poe published the tale without saying it was fiction, and many readers took it as fact.

In Poe's The Purloined Letter, where does Dupin spot the stolen letter the police failed to find?

In a cheap card rack by the mantelpiece, looking dirty and half torn, is where it hangs. Dupin guessed the thief would skip clever hiding places and leave it in plain sight.

In Poe's The Masque of the Red Death, which object in the black room halts the whole party every hour?

An ebony clock chimes so ominously that the orchestra stops and the dancers fall silent until it finishes. Few guests dare enter its room, which is lit blood-red through stained glass.

Which country's troops storm Toledo and save the prisoner at the end of Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum?

France's General Lasalle takes the city, and an arm catches the prisoner as red-hot walls tip him into the pit. The real Lasalle never commanded the occupation of Toledo.

The only Poe book to reach a second US edition in his lifetime was a textbook on which subject?

Seashells were the subject of The Conchologist's First Book, which sold out within two months. Poe got $50 for putting his name on the title page and no royalties at all.

Which former US president founded the Charlottesville university where Edgar Allan Poe studied in 1826?

Thomas Jefferson let its students choose their own studies and govern themselves. He died that July, and a classmate later recalled Poe being at the funeral.

Which American poet was the only one to attend the 1875 dedication of Poe's grave monument?

Walt Whitman was the only leading poet who came, though several were asked. Poe had lain unmarked for years: his first headstone was smashed when a train derailed into the mason's yard.

Which organisation hands out the yearly Edgar Awards, named for Poe, to the best crime fiction?

Mystery Writers of America, based in New York City, also honours television, film and theatre. It gives a separate Raven Award for services to the genre outside creative writing.

Which city holds the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site, the last of several homes he rented there?

Philadelphia was his home from 1838 to 1844, and he published 31 stories while living there. A statue of a large raven now stands outside the house.

Poe's late poem Eldorado, about a knight's lifelong quest, was partly a reaction to which American event?

The California Gold Rush was under way, and a newspaper had just dubbed California the El Dorado of the United States. Poe's knight grows old on the search and is finally sent on by a ghostly pilgrim.

Whose story collection Twice-Told Tales did Edgar Allan Poe praise in a famous two-part review in 1842?

Nathaniel Hawthorne won praise for remarkable originality and a style Poe called purity itself. Poe used the same review to argue that a short tale should rivet the reader's attention.

Which English poet's Lady Geraldine's Courtship gave Poe the rhythm for The Raven and won his dedication?

Elizabeth Barrett had The Raven and Other Poems dedicated to her, and she wrote to tell Poe that his bird had caused a sensation in England.

Which French painter made the lithographs for Stéphane Mallarmé's 1875 translation of Poe's The Raven?

Édouard Manet illustrated the edition, titled Le Corbeau, which printed the symbolist poet's French version alongside Poe's English text.

Which French composer spent years on an opera of Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher but never finished it?

Claude Debussy wrote his own libretto and began work in 1908, hoping to follow the success of Pelléas et Mélisande. That earlier piece remained the only opera he ever completed.

In Poe's tale The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall, where does a bellows-mender travel by balloon?

The Moon turns out to be home to short, earless people who live in cities. One of them flies down to Rotterdam by balloon to deliver Pfaall's account of the trip.

In Poe's The Oval Portrait, what happens to the painter's bride at the moment he finishes her picture?

She dies as the last touch goes on, after sitting meekly for many weeks in his turret room. He had rarely taken his eyes off the canvas, even to look at her.

Poe's first published tale, Metzengerstein, turns on a young baron's obsession with which animal?

A horse matching one in an old tapestry appears after a rival family's patriarch is killed in a fire. When the baron's own castle burns, it carries him into the flames.

Which kind of building is the setting of the unfinished diary story thought to be Poe's last work?

A lighthouse is where the diarist arrives on New Year's Day 1796, glad to be alone with his dog Neptune and write a book. The fragment breaks off as he frets about the chalk the tower stands on.

Six brothers named Poe, distant cousins of the writer, starred in American football for which university?

Princeton fielded the six between 1882 and 1901. In 1899 one of them won a game with a field goal in the last 30 seconds, despite never having kicked in a match before.

What was the name of Charles Dickens's pet raven, widely thought to have inspired Poe's famous bird?

Grip buried coins and cheese in the garden and bit the children until she was banished to the shed. After she died, Dickens had her stuffed and kept her above his desk.

Edgar Allan Poe dared readers of a weekly paper to send him what, boasting he could solve them all?

Coded messages poured in, and he cracked their simple substitution ciphers with little effort. He then cashed in on the craze by building The Gold-Bug around one.

In Poe's The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether, who is secretly running the asylum?

The patients have locked up the staff, led by a superintendent who went insane himself. The real keepers finally burst in covered in tar and feathers, after one escapes through the sewers.