1843: Poe, The Black Cat

"Edgar Allan Poe" by Hadi Kraimi

An Orphan

Edgar Poe was two years old when his mother died in 1811. With his father out of the picture, Poe was taken in and raised by the family of John Allan, a Richmond, Virginia tobacco merchant.

Childhood Years with Foster Parents in England

In 1815, Poe was 6 years old, when he and the Allans moved to England. Poe went to good schools there.

A Familial Rift

In 1820, Poe and the Allans moved back to Richmond.

In 1824, John Allan's business failed, and he and Poe had a falling out.

Freshman Flame Out

In 1826, at the age of 15, Poe enrolled as a student at the University of Virginia. His father provided him with minimal financial support. Poe began drinking. He incurred debts, which increased when he tried gambling to pay them off.  He had to leave the University before the end of his first year.

In the Army

In 1827, John Allan kicked Poe out of his house, and Poe joined the army and published a collection of his poems.

In 1830, Poe was admitted to West Point. When John Allan remarried, Poe lost hope of inheriting his foster father's wealth (which included slaves), stopped going to classes, and was expelled.

Poverty and Publications

Beginning in 1831, Poe wrote and published poems and stories while living in poverty with relatives in Baltimore, including his aunt and his eight-year-old cousin Virginia.

Silent on Slavery

In 1835, he moved back to Richmond and became an editorial assistant at the Southern Literary Messenger, which "adopted a middle-of-the-road position linking slvery to states' rights rather than God's will" (Levine 732). According to the Norton Anthology of American Literature, Beginnings to 1865, "Like many white writers of the time, Poe sometimes resorted to racial stereotypes, and he sometimes conveyed his fears of the possibilities of black violence" (Levine 732).  Even though Poe "spent years in the South and even held hopes of inheriting the property of a slaveholder, the fact is that his relative silence on the political debate on slavery makes him notably different from most southern intellectuals of the time . . . who went on record with their proslavery views" (Levine 733).

My Cousin, My Child-Bride

In 1836, he was 27 when he married his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia.

Alcoholism and Literary Rise

Fired from his editorial job in 1837, in part because of his drinking, Poe and his wife and aunt/mother-in-law moved to New York City. That year, he published The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

In 1838, Poe moved to Philadelphia, where he got a steady job as a co-editor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine. While there, he published "The Fall of the House of Usher." In 1840, he was fired for his drinking.

Inventing Detective Fiction

Poe was subsequently employed by a new magazine called Graham's, where he published "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," which "many critics regard as the earliest example of detective fiction" (Levine 733).

Literary Heights

"The Tell-Tale Heart" was published in January 1843 in The Pioneer.

"The Black Cat" was published in August 1843 in the Saturday Evening Post.

In 1844, he moved his family back to New York City, where he worked at another journal. In 1845, his poem "The Raven," "was published.

Tragedy and Death

In 1847, his wife, Virginia, died from tuberculosis.

In 1849, Poe was found unconscious in Baltimore and taken to a hospital, where he died.

Legacy

Poe was a pragmatic professional writer "who recognized the advent of a mass market and wanted to succeed in it." He did this by writing stories about "aristocratic madmen, self-tormented murderers, neurasthenic necrophiliacs" (Levine 734).  Poe, "more than most, understood his audience . . . and sought ways to gain its attention for stories that, aside from their shock value, regularly addressed compelling philosophical, cultural, psychological, and scientific issues; the place of irrationality, violence and repression in human consciousness and social institutions; the alienation and dislocations attending democratic mass culture and the modernizing forces of the time; the tug and pull of the material and the corporeal; the absolutely terrifying dimensions of one's own mind; and new ideas about technology and the physical universe" (Levine 734).