Edgar Allan Poe Trivia
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99 free Edgar Allan Poe trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
55 free Edgar Allan Poe trivia questions with answers. Edgar Allan Poe invented the detective story, helped invent science fiction, wrote the most famous poem in American literature and died in a Baltimore gutter at 40 without anyone knowing why. This quiz covers the whole strange arc: the actor parents, the foster father he fought with, the Army stint under a false name, the deliberate court-martial at West Point, the child bride, the magazine jobs he kept losing, and the death theories from rabies to election fraud. The stories and poems get their due too: The Raven and the Dickens bird that inspired it, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Cask of Amontillado, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Black Cat, The Gold-Bug, Dupin's three cases, Annabel Lee and The Bells. It suits English classes, book clubs and Halloween trivia nights alike, with easy questions up front and genuinely obscure ones at the back. Every answer was checked against the Wikipedia articles on Poe, his works and his death, and each question shows the sentence that supports it once you answer. Free, no signup.
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Q 01In which city was Edgar Allan Poe born in 1809?
Boston
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'.
Q 02What was the profession of both of Poe's parents?
Actors
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.
Q 03From whom did Edgar Poe take the middle name Allan?
His foster father
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.
Q 04Poe left the University of Virginia after one year, chiefly because of what?
Gambling debts
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.
Q 05Under what assumed name did Poe enlist in the US Army in 1827?
Edgar A. Perry
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.
Q 06Which horror star led Roger Corman's 1960s Poe films, including House of Usher and The Pit and the Pendulum?
Vincent Price
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.
Q 07Which book, Poe's first, appeared anonymously in 1827 and survives in only about a dozen copies?
Tamerlane
Tamerlane and Other Poems sank so completely that its very existence was later doubted; no copy surfaced for decades.
Q 08What rank did Poe reach during his two years in the US Army?
Sergeant major
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.
Q 09How did Poe engineer his exit from the US Military Academy at West Point in 1831?
A deliberate court-martial
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.
Q 10Poe married 13-year-old Virginia Clemm in 1836; how were the two already related?
First cousins
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.
Q 11What disease killed Virginia Poe in 1847?
Tuberculosis
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.
Q 12In which New York City borough is the cottage where Virginia died and Poe wrote his last poems?
The Bronx
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.
Q 13Which magazine in his boyhood home city hired Poe in 1835, then briefly let him go over his drinking?
Southern Literary Messenger
Q 21What is the name of the lost love the narrator of The Raven is mourning?
Lenore
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'.
Q 22In which month is The Raven set?
December
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.
Q 23What phrase closes The Raven's opening stanza?
Nothing more
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.
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'.
Q 14What did Poe rename the magazine he planned for years to launch, first called The Penn?
The Stylus
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.
Q 15Which famous American poet did Poe publicly accuse of plagiarism, in an 1845 feud remembered as a 'War'?
H. W. Longfellow
H. W. Longfellow never answered Poe's attacks in public; friends took up his defence instead.
Q 16What mocking nickname did Poe give the transcendentalists, after a pond on a New England common?
Frog-Pondians
Frog-Pondians was his jab at Emerson's circle; he wrote that he had no patience whatever with 'the mystics for mysticism's sake'.
Q 17Which animated series retold Poe's The Raven in its first Halloween special, with James Earl Jones narrating?
The Simpsons
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.
Q 18Which pseudonym, shared with a 17th-century English poet, signed The Raven in The American Review?
Quarles
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.
Q 19The talking raven in The Raven was partly inspired by a bird in which Charles Dickens novel?
Barnaby Rudge
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.
Q 20In The Raven, the bird perches on a bust of which goddess?
Pallas Athena
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.
Q 24In which essay did Poe describe the method he claimed to have used to write The Raven?
The Philosophy of Composition
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.
Q 25Which 1841 Poe story is generally credited as the first modern detective story?
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
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.
Q 26Which animal turns out to be the killer in the first case of Poe's detective Dupin?
An orangutan
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.
Q 27In which city does Poe's detective C. Auguste Dupin operate?
Paris
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.
Q 28In The Tell-Tale Heart, what feature of the old man drives the narrator to murder?
His pale blue eye
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.
Q 29In Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, where does the narrator hide the old man's body?
Under the floorboards
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.
Q 30What are the names of the twin siblings in The Fall of the House of Usher?
Roderick and Madeline
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.