60 Fun Facts About Edgar Allan Poe

In which city was Edgar Allan Poe born in 1809?

Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809; his mother Eliza left him a watercolour of Boston Harbor inscribed to her little son Edgar, who should ever love the place of his birth.

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

Both parents were actors: David Poe Jr. and Eliza Arnold Hopkins Poe performed with touring stage companies; David abandoned the family in 1810 and Eliza died in Richmond late in 1811.

Which Richmond merchant took in the orphaned Poe and gave him his middle name?

John Allan, a Scottish-born Richmond tobacco merchant, took Edgar in after his mother's death in 1811; the Allans gave him their surname but never formally adopted him.

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

Poe ran up gambling debts at cards while trying to cover expenses his foster father underfunded; when the debts went unpaid he left Charlottesville at the end of 1826 after one year.

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

Poe enlisted as Edgar A. Perry on May 26, 1827, claiming to be 22 when he was 18; he was posted first to Fort Independence on Castle Island at five dollars a month.

Poe's first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, was credited to whom on its title page?

The 1827 title page read simply 'By a Bostonian'; printed by Calvin F. S. Thomas, the pamphlet had a run of perhaps 50 copies and drew virtually no attention.

How many copies of Tamerlane and Other Poems are known to survive?

Twelve copies are known to survive; one sold at Christie's in 2009 for $662,500, then a record auction price for a work of American literature.

What rank did Poe reach during his two years as an enlisted soldier?

Poe rose to sergeant major for artillery by January 1829, the highest rank a non-commissioned officer could reach, after postings in South Carolina and at Fort Monroe in Virginia.

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

Poe engineered a deliberate court-martial by skipping drills, classes and chapel; dismissed in March 1831, he left with cadets' subscriptions of 75 cents each toward his next volume, Poems.

How old was Poe's cousin Virginia Clemm when he married her in 1836?

He was 27; a witness at the ceremony falsely attested that she was 21.

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 Poe Cottage stands in Fordham in the Bronx; the family rented it in 1846, and in 1913 it was moved a short distance across Kingsbridge Road into Poe Park.

Which Richmond magazine did Poe join as assistant editor in 1835, only to be fired for allegedly drinking?

Poe joined the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond in 1835; owner Thomas W. White dismissed him within weeks over drinking, then reinstated him on a promise of sobriety.

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

Poe renamed his projected magazine The Stylus in 1843, dropping The Penn after the Philadelphia plan collapsed; despite prospectuses and subscription drives it never printed a single issue.

Which famous American poet did Poe publicly accuse of plagiarism, in a feud his critics dubbed a 'War'?

Poe accused Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of plagiarism in 1845, in a series of Broadway Journal articles dubbed the 'Longfellow War'; Longfellow never replied, though a defender signing 'Outis' did.

What did Poe nickname the transcendentalists, after a pond on the Common in his birthplace?

Poe called the transcendentalists 'Frog-Pondians', after the Frog Pond on the Common in the city of his birth, and dismissed their writing as 'metaphor run mad' and 'mysticism for mysticism's sake'.

On what date did the New York Evening Mirror print The Raven under Poe's name, making him a sensation?

The Evening Mirror ran The Raven on January 29, 1845, as an advance printing from The American Review's February issue; the poem made Poe a household name almost overnight.

Under what pseudonym was The Raven simultaneously published in The American Review?

The American Review printed The Raven in its February 1845 issue signed 'Quarles', a nod to the 17th-century emblem poet Francis Quarles; Poe had also used Henri Le Rennet as an alias in 1827.

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?

The narrator mourns 'the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore'; Poe borrowed the poem's trochaic octameter from Elizabeth Barrett's 'Lady Geraldine's Courtship'.

In which month is The Raven set?

The poem is set in December: 'Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December; / And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.'

How many stanzas make up The Raven?

The Raven runs to 18 stanzas of six lines each, 108 lines in all, in trochaic octameter, each stanza closing on 'nothing more' or 'Nevermore'.

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 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.

Who turns out to be the killer in C. Auguste Dupin's first case?

The killer is an escaped orangutan belonging to a sailor; Dupin deduces it from a tuft of non-human hair and the inhuman strength required, then advertises for the animal's owner.

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

Dupin lives and works in Paris, sharing rooms in the Faubourg Saint-Germain with the unnamed narrator; he appears in three stories, the last being The Purloined Letter (1844).

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

The narrator hides the dismembered body under the floorboards and then hears the heart beating.

The Tell-Tale Heart first appeared in 1843 in a magazine edited by which poet?

James Russell Lowell printed The Tell-Tale Heart in the first issue of his short-lived monthly The Pioneer, January 1843, paying Poe $10; the magazine folded after three issues.

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 Philadelphia fashion and household monthly aimed at women, printed The Cask of Amontillado in November 1846; its revenge plot unfolds in an unnamed Italian city at Carnival.

Prince Prospero hides from the plague in how many differently coloured rooms in The Masque of the Red Death?

Prospero's abbey has seven rooms, each in a different colour from blue through purple, green, orange, white and violet to the black chamber with blood-red windows; a 1964 film starred Vincent Price.

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?

The cat is named Pluto, after the Roman god of the underworld; after the narrator hangs it, his house burns down, leaving on one wall the image of a cat on a noose.

The Gold-Bug won a prize from the Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper and became what during Poe's lifetime?

The Gold-Bug took the Dollar Newspaper's $100 prize in June 1843 and was reprinted so widely that it became his most-read prose work during his lifetime, feeding a public craze for cryptography.

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

Legrand lives in a hut on Sullivan's Island near Charleston, where Poe served at Fort Moultrie from November 1827; the treasure hunt turns on a substitution cipher he cracks.

Which is Poe's only complete novel?

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) is Poe's only completed novel; Jules Verne wrote a sequel, An Antarctic Mystery (1897), and The Guardian placed it among its 100 best English-language novels in 2013.

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

Eureka describes a universe that burst from a single 'primordial particle' and will collapse back, foreshadowing the Big Bang theory of the 1920s and 1930s; it also offered an early plausible resolution of Olbers' paradox.

Annabel Lee, Poe's last complete poem, is most often read as a tribute to whom?

The poem, finished in 1849, is usually read as mourning his wife Virginia, who died in 1847; his boyhood sweetheart Sarah Elmira Royster Shelton insisted it was written about her instead.

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

Tintinnabulation, from the Latin tintinnabulum (a small bell), recurs in the poem's first section; the word predates Poe but is often wrongly assumed to be his own coinage.

In which city was Poe found delirious in a tavern on October 3, 1849, days before his death?

Poe was found at Gunner's Hall, a Baltimore tavern on East Lombard Street, wearing someone else's clothes; he died at Washington College Hospital on October 7, aged 40, never explaining what had happened.

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

Cooping was a form of election fraud: gangs kidnapped men, plied them with drink, and marched them to vote repeatedly in disguise; the tavern where Poe was found was a polling place on election day.

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 of October 9, 1849 with 'Edgar Allan Poe is dead... few will be grieved by it', then became Poe's literary executor and forged letters to blacken him.

Which NFL team was named after Poe's most famous poem, in a 1996 fan contest?

The Baltimore Ravens took their name from a 1996 newspaper fan poll in which 'Ravens' beat 'Americans' and 'Marauders'; Poe spent part of his career in the city and is buried there.

What did the mysterious 'Poe Toaster' leave at Poe's grave every January 19 from 1949 to 2009?

The Poe Toaster left a bottle of cognac and three roses on the grave each January 19, Poe's birthday; the original visitor's last appearance was on the 2009 bicentennial.

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's translations made Poe especially revered in France?

Charles Baudelaire translated Poe's tales between 1856 and 1865 (Histoires extraordinaires) and championed him as a kindred spirit; his versions became the standard Poe across continental Europe.

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

To Helen, first printed in Poe's 1831 Poems, honours Jane Stith Stanard, mother of his Richmond schoolmate Robert Stanard; the teenage Poe idolised her, and she died in 1824.

What is Richmond's oldest standing building, home of the Edgar Allan Poe Museum, called?

The Old Stone House on East Main Street, built around 1740, is Richmond's oldest surviving dwelling and has housed the Poe Museum since 1922; Poe never lived there.

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

The Sun ran Poe's Balloon-Hoax on April 13, 1844, reporting that Monck Mason had crossed the Atlantic by balloon in 75 hours; the paper printed a retraction two days later.

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 often-overlooked story won Poe 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; Poe lobbied Tyler's son Robert, through his friend Frederick W. Thomas, for a post in the Philadelphia Custom House, then missed a key meeting, pleading illness.

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 cryptologist, inspired by reading The Gold-Bug as a child, later broke Japan's PURPLE code?

William Friedman, who read The Gold-Bug as a boy, led the US Army Signal Intelligence Service team that broke Japan's PURPLE diplomatic cipher in 1940; Poe himself had solved readers' ciphers in Alexander's Weekly Messenger.