Poe was born on January 19, 1809, in Baltimore, Mass., to David and Elizabeth Poe. Poe's father David married an English woman, Elizabeth, who was in the same traveling company. Poe had a brother, Henry, and a sister, Rosaline. Poe's grandfather was referred to as "General Poe of Revolutionary fame," and his great-grandfather was an immigrant laborer who supplied the Revolutionary Army with clothing (Krutch 20).

On December 8, 1811, Elizabeth Poe died of tuberculosis at the young age of twenty-four. "The image of his mother's young, still, white face was

"By knowing who one has been, one knows who one will be, and when and how one will die. Like the hero of The Fall of the House of Usher, Poe states, 'I shall perish ... I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and not otherwise, shall I be lost...'" (Carlson 235). Poe wrote to his aunt, Mrs. Clemm: "I must die. I have no desire to live since I have done 'Eureka'" (Asselineau 42). Before Poe went on his way to start up the Stylus, he made certain arrangements. If he were to die, Rufus W. Griswold was to be his literary executor and Nathaniel W. Griswold was to be his biographer. One may conclude by statements such as these that Edgar Allan Poe had a conscious desire to make the trip into the afterworld.

In 1845 Poe reached the height of his fame. Poe was offered the editorship of Graham's Magazine, only if he gave up his irregular behavior (Nevins 287). Under his management Graham's Magazine had become perhaps the most important magazine in America. Before Poe began at Graham's Magazine the distribution of the magazine was five thousand copies, but with Poe at the helm, distribution rose to thirty-five thousand copies. At Graham's Magazine, Poe made a salary of eight hundred dollars a year, compared to the ten dollars a week he made at the Southern Literary Magazine.

There is a gentleman, rather the worse for wear, at Ryan's fourth ward polls, who goes under the cognomen of Edgar A. Poe, and who appears in great distress, and says he is acquainted with you, and I assure you he is in need or immediate assistance.

Poe is both a dreamy fantasist and a cerebral logician. He lingers with science and is chilled by its abstractions. He resolutely closes his eyes to factual reality and examines it in detail. He works with melancholy, and with humor; with burlesque, and with realism. He probes fascinated, into horrible obsessions, and gazes, enchanted, at eternal beauty (20-21).

On the twenty-second of September 1835, Poe and Virginia Clemm, his cousin, were married in Baltimore. In May of the following year they arranged for a public weeding. On the affidavit, it declared that Virginia was "of the full age of twenty-one," although she was not quite fourteen. In 1842 Virginia was playing the harp and coughed up blood on her dress. This showed that she was in the early stages of tuberculosis. This disease, tuberculosis, had taken Edgar's father, brother, and all of the women he ever loved. Virginia died of tuberculosis on January 30, 1847.

In 1826 Poe was engaged to Sarah Elmira Royster; however, her parents broke off the engagement. Apparently, she married and her husband passed away around 1848. In 1849 Poe proposed to Sarah Elmira Royster Shelton, but she was having difficulty saying "yes"; probably because her late husband's will penalized her for remarrying. If she remarried, she stood to lose control of her late husband's estate and would only receive one-fourth of the income it generated.

In conclusion, it is false to call Poe little more than an artist of nightmares, hallucinations, insane crimes, and weird beauties, little more than an intuitive poetic genius. A quote that best defines Poe is from Vincent Buranelli's book,

The Tell-Tale Heart, one of Poe's most famous stories, was published in 1843. In the story, the narrator plans to kill the old man, because of his filmy, vulture-like blue eye. After seven nights, he finally murders the old man, and buries his chopped up body under the floorboard of the room. The next day the police come over to the house to check out a call from the night before, which was placed by a neighbor who said they heard a scream. The police begin to question the narrator, and he starts to hear a pounding in his ear. He believes that the police hear this pounding, which is the beat of the old man's heart; so he screams out at length his confession (Gale 105).

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Approximate Word count = 3102
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page double spaced)