Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" -- The First Detective Story Ever!

Edgar Allan Poe: Master of the Macabre (FULL MOVIE)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qS3uaDYfNGw

Images:
1. Mathew Brady studio portrait of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
2. Illustration by Aubrey Beardsley of 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', 1895
3. 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' modern cover
4. Murders in the Rue Morgue illustration by Clarke

Background from {[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Murders_in_the_Rue_Morgue]}
The Murders in the Rue Morgue from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Author Edgar Allan Poe
Country United States
Language English
Genre(s) Detective fiction
Short story
Published in Graham's Magazine
Media type Print (Magazine)
Publication date April 1841
"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe published in Graham's Magazine in 1841. It has been described as the first modern detective story;[1][2] Poe referred to it as one of his "tales of ratiocination".[1]
C. Auguste Dupin is a man in Paris who solves the mystery of the brutal murder of two women. Numerous witnesses heard a suspect, though no one agrees on what language was spoken. At the murder scene, Dupin finds a hair that does not appear to be human.
As the first fictional detective, Poe's Dupin displays many traits which became literary conventions in subsequent fictional detectives, including Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. Many later characters, for example, follow Poe's model of the brilliant detective, his personal friend who serves as narrator, and the final revelation being presented before the reasoning that leads up to it. Dupin himself reappears in "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" and "The Purloined Letter".

Plot summary
The unnamed narrator of the story opens with a lengthy commentary on the nature and practice of analytical reasoning, then describes the circumstances under which he first met Dupin during an extended visit to Paris. The two share rooms in a dilapidated old mansion and allow no visitors, having cut off all contact with past acquaintances and venturing outside only at night. "We existed within ourselves alone," the narrator states. One evening, Dupin demonstrates his analytical prowess by deducing the narrator's thoughts about a particular stage actor, based on clues gathered from the narrator's previous words and actions.
During the remainder of that evening and the following morning, Dupin and the narrator read with great interest the newspaper accounts of a baffling double murder. Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter have been found dead at their home in the Rue Morgue, a fictional street in Paris. The mother was found in a yard behind the house, with multiple broken bones and her throat so deeply cut that her head fell off when the body was moved. The daughter was found strangled to death and stuffed upside down into a chimney. The murders occurred in a fourth-floor room that was locked from the inside; on the floor were found a bloody straight razor, several bloody tufts of gray hair, and two bags of gold coins. Several witnesses reported hearing two voices at the time of the murder, one male and French, but disagreed on the language spoken by the other. The speech was unclear, and all witnesses claimed not to know the language they believed the second voice to be speaking.
A bank clerk named Adolphe Le Bon, who had delivered the gold coins to the ladies the day before, is arrested even though there is no other evidence linking him to the crime. Remembering a service that Le Bon once performed for him, Dupin becomes intrigued and offers his assistance to "G–", the prefect of police.
Because none of the witnesses can agree on the language spoken by the second voice, Dupin concludes they were not hearing a human voice at all. He and the narrator examine the house thoroughly; the following day, Dupin dismisses the idea of both Le Bon's guilt and a robbery motive, citing the fact that the gold was not taken from the room. He also points out that the murderer would have had to have superhuman strength to force the daughter's body up the chimney. He formulates a method by which the murderer could have entered the room and killed both women, involving an agile climb up a lightning rod and a leap to a set of open window shutters. Showing an unusual tuft of hair he recovered from the scene, and demonstrating the impossibility of the daughter being strangled by a human hand, Dupin concludes that an "Ourang-Outang" (orangutan) killed the women. He has placed an advertisement in the local newspaper asking if anyone has lost such an animal, and a sailor soon arrives looking for it.
The sailor offers to pay a reward, but Dupin is interested only in learning the circumstances behind the two murders. The sailor explains that he captured the orangutan while in Borneo and brought it back to Paris, but had trouble keeping it under control. When he saw the orangutan attempting to shave its face with his straight razor, imitating his morning grooming, it fled into the streets and reached the Rue Morgue, where it climbed up and into the house. The orangutan seized the mother by the hair and was waving the razor, imitating a barber; when she screamed in fear, it flew into a rage, ripped her hair out, slashed her throat, and strangled the daughter. The sailor climbed up the lightning rod in an attempt to catch the animal, and the two voices heard by witnesses belonged to it and to him. Fearing punishment by its master, the orangutan threw the mother's body out the window and stuffed the daughter into the chimney before fleeing.
The sailor sells the orangutan, Le Bon is released from custody, and G– mentions that people should mind their own business once Dupin tells him the story. Dupin comments to the narrator that G– is "somewhat too cunning to be profound", but admires his ability "de nier ce qui est, et d'expliquer ce qui n'est pas" (a quote from Julie, or the New Heloise by Jean-Jacques Rousseau: "to deny that which is, and explain that which is not").

Themes and analysis
In a letter to friend Dr. Joseph Snodgrass, Poe said of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", "its theme was the exercise of ingenuity in detecting a murderer."[3] Dupin is not a professional detective; he decides to investigate the murders in the Rue Morgue for his personal amusement. He also has a desire for truth and to prove a falsely accused man innocent. His interests are not financial and he even declines a monetary reward from the owner of the orangutan.[4] The revelation of the actual murderer removes the crime, as neither the orangutan nor its owner can be held responsible.[5] Poe scholar Arthur Hobson Quinn speculates that later detective stories might have set up M. Le Bon, the suspect who is arrested, as appearing guilty as a red herring, though Poe chose not to.[6]
Poe wrote "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" at a time when crime was at the forefront in people's minds due to urban development. London had recently established its first professional police force and American cities were beginning to focus on scientific police work as newspapers reported murders and criminal trials.[1] "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" continues an urban theme that was used several times in Poe's fiction, in particular "The Man of the Crowd", likely inspired by Poe's time living in Philadelphia.[7]
The tale has an underlying metaphor for the battle of brains vs. brawn. Physical strength, depicted as the orangutan as well as its owner, stand for violence: the orangutan is a murderer, while its owner admits he has abused the animal with a whip. The analyst's brainpower overcomes their violence.[8] The story also contains Poe's often-used theme of the death of a beautiful woman, which he called the "most poetical topic in the world".[9][10]

Dupin's method
Poe defines Dupin's method, ratiocination, using the example of a card player: "the extent of information obtained; lies not so much in the validity of the inference as in the quality of the observation."[11][12] Poe then provides a narrative example where Dupin explains how he knew the narrator was thinking about the actor Chantilly.[13][14] Dupin then applies his method to the solving of this crime.
Dupin's method emphasizes the importance of reading and the written word. The newspaper accounts pique his curiosity; he learns about orangutans from a written account by "Cuvier" — likely Georges Cuvier, the French zoologist. This method also engages the reader, who follows along by reading the clues himself.[15] Poe also emphasizes the power of the spoken word. When Dupin asks the sailor for information about the murders, the sailor himself acts out a partial death: "The sailor's face flushed up as if he were struggling with suffocation... the next moment he fell back into his seat, trembling violently, and with the countenance of death itself."[16]
Literary significance and reception[edit]
Poe biographer Jeffrey Meyers sums up the significance of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" by saying it "changed the history of world literature."[2] Often cited as the first detective fiction story, the character of Dupin became the prototype for many future fictional detectives, including Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot. The genre is distinctive from a general mystery story in that the focus is on analysis.[17] Poe's role in the creation of the detective story is reflected in the Edgar Awards, given annually by the Mystery Writers of America.[18]
"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" also established many tropes that would become common elements in mystery fiction: the eccentric but brilliant detective, the bumbling constabulary, the first-person narration by a close personal friend. Poe also portrays the police in an unsympathetic manner as a sort of foil to the detective.[19] Poe also initiates the storytelling device where the detective announces his solution and then explains the reasoning leading up to it.[20] It is also the first locked room mystery in detective fiction.[21]
Upon its release, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and its author were praised for the creation of a new profound novelty.[9] The Pennsylvania Inquirer printed that "it proves Mr Poe to be a man of genius... with an inventive power and skill, of which we know no parallel."[21] Poe, however, downplayed his achievement in a letter to Philip Pendleton Cooke:[22]
These tales of ratiocination owe most of their popularity to being something in a new key. I do not mean to say that they are not ingenious – but people think them more ingenious than they are – on account of their method and air of method. In the "Murders in the Rue Morgue", for instance, where is the ingenuity in unraveling a web which you yourself... have woven for the express purpose of unraveling?"[3]
Modern readers are occasionally put off by Poe's violation of an implicit narrative convention: readers should be able to guess the solution as they read. The twist ending, however, is a sign of "bad faith" on Poe's part because readers would not reasonably include an orangutan on their list of potential murderers.[23]

Inspiration
The word detective did not exist at the time Poe wrote "The Murders in the Rue Morgue",[9] though there were other stories that featured similar problem-solving characters. Das Fräulein von Scuderi (1819), by E. T. A. Hoffmann, in which Mlle. de Scuderi, a kind of 19th-century Miss Marple, establishes the innocence of the police's favorite suspect in the murder of a jeweler, is sometimes cited as the first detective story.[24] Other forerunners include Voltaire's Zadig (1748), with a main character who performs similar feats of analysis,[1] themselves borrowed from The Three Princes of Serendip, an Italian rendition of Amir Khusro's "Hasht-Bihisht".[25]
Poe may also have been expanding on previous analytical works of his own including the essay on "Maelzel's Chess Player" and the comedic "Three Sundays in a Week".[21] As for the twist in the plot, Poe was likely inspired by the crowd reaction to an orangutan on display at the Masonic Hall in Philadelphia in July 1839.[2] Poe might have picked up some of the relevant biological knowledge from collaborating with Thomas Wyatt,[26] with Poe furthermore linking "his narrative with the subject of evolution, especially the studies done by Cuvier",[27] possibly also influenced by the studies conducted by Lord Monboddo,[28] though it has been argued that Poe's information was "more literary than scientific".[29]
The name of the main character may have been inspired from the "Dupin" character in a series of stories first published in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in 1828 called "Unpublished passages in the Life of Vidocq, the French Minister of Police".[30] Poe would likely have known the story, which features an analytical man who discovers a murderer, though the two plots share little resemblance. Murder victims in both stories, however, have their neck cut so badly that the head is almost entirely removed from the body.[31] Dupin actually mentions Vidocq by name, dismissing him as "a good guesser".[32]

Publication history
Poe originally titled the story "Murders in the Rue Trianon" but renamed it to better associate with death.[33] "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" first appeared in Graham's Magazine in April 1841 while Poe was working as an editor. He was paid an additional $56 for it — an unusually high figure; he was only paid $9 for "The Raven".[34] In 1843, Poe had the idea to print a series of pamphlets with his stories entitled The Prose Romances of Edgar A. Poe. He printed only one, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" oddly collected with the satirical "The Man That Was Used Up". It sold for 12 and a half cents.[35] This version included 52 changes from the original text from Graham's, including the new line: "The Prefect is somewhat too cunning to be profound", a change from the original "too cunning to be acute".[36] "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" was also reprinted in Wiley & Putnam's collection of Poe's stories simply called Tales. Poe did not take part in selecting which tales would be collected.[37]
Poe's sequel to "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" was "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt", first serialized in December 1842 and January 1843. Though subtitled "A Sequel to 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue'", "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" shares very few common elements with "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" beyond the inclusion of C. Auguste Dupin and the Paris setting.[38] Dupin reappeared in "The Purloined Letter", which Poe called "perhaps the best of my tales of ratiocination" in a letter to James Russell Lowell in July 1844.[39]
The original manuscript of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" which was used for its first printing in Graham's Magazine was discarded in a wastebasket. An apprentice at the office, J. M. Johnston, retrieved it and left it with his father for safekeeping. It was left in a music book, where it survived three house fires before being bought by George William Childs. In 1891, Childs presented the manuscript, re-bound with a letter explaining its history, to Drexel University.[40] Childs had also donated $650 for the completion of Edgar Allan Poe's new grave monument in Baltimore, Maryland in 1875.[41]
"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" was one of the earliest of Poe's works to be translated into French. Between June 11 and June 13, 1846, "Un meurtre sans exemple dans les Fastes de la Justice" was published in La Quotidienne, a Paris newspaper. Poe's name was not mentioned and many details, including the name of the Rue Morgue and the main characters ("Dupin" became "Bernier"), were changed.[42] On October 12, 1846, another uncredited translation, renamed "Une Sanglante Enigme", was published in Le Commerce. The editor of Le Commerce was accused of plagiarizing the story from La Quotidienne. The accusation went to trial and the public discussion brought Poe's name to the attention of the French public.[42]

Adaptations
"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" has been adapted for radio, film and television many times.
• The 1908 American silent film Sherlock Holmes in the Great Murder Mystery was an adaptation of the story, with Dupin replaced by Sherlock Holmes. The film is lost and the director and cast are unknown.
• The story was adapted in a short silent film made in 1914.[43]
• The first full-length version was Murders in the Rue Morgue by Universal Pictures in 1932, directed by Robert Florey and starring Bela Lugosi, Leon Ames and Sidney Fox, with Arlene Francis.[17] The film bears little resemblance to the original story.
• Another adaptation, Phantom of the Rue Morgue, was released in 1954 by Warner Brothers, directed by Roy Del Ruth and starring Karl Malden and Patricia Medina.
• A TV movie made by Syndicated in 1968, The Murders in the Rue de Morgue, is an adaptation by James MacTaggart, starring Walter Horsbrugh, Charles Kay and Dennis Edwards.
• A film in 1971 directed by Gordon Hessler with the title Murders in the Rue Morgue had little to do with the Poe story.
• On January 7, 1975, a radio-play version was broadcast on CBS Radio Mystery Theater.
• A made-for-TV movie, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, aired in 1986. It was directed by Jeannot Szwarc and starred George C. Scott, Sebastian Roché, Rebecca De Mornay, Ian McShane, and Val Kilmer.
• It has also been adapted as a video game by Big Fish Games for their "Dark Tales" franchise under the title "Dark Tales: Edgar Allan Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue".[44]
• Murders in the Rue Morgue, and The Gold Bug (1973), a simplified version by Robert James Dixson, was published by Regents Pub. Co.
• British heavy metal band Iron Maiden has a song on their 1981 album Killers titled Murders in Rue Morgue, the lyrics are told from the perspective of a man stumbling upon the 2 bodies and then fleeing the scene after being falsely accused of committing the murders (Something which did not happen in the story).
• The first volume (1999) of Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's comic book series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen retcons the murders to have been perpetrated by Mr. Hyde, and establishes that Dupin (also a character of the story) was wrong. Also, the story states that the murders have restarted, with one of the victims being Anna Coupeau from Émile Zola's Nana.
• In 2004, Dark Horse Comics released a one-shot comic book Van Helsing: From Beneath the Rue Morgue using a murder scene from Poe's story.
• Morgue Street is a 2012 short film directed by Alberto Viavattene starring Federica Tommasi and Désirée Giorgetti.[45][46]


References[edit]
1. ^ Jump up to:a b c d Silverman 1991, p. 171
2. ^ Jump up to:a b c Meyers 1992, p. 123
3. ^ Jump up to:a b Quinn 1998, p. 354
4. ^ Whalen 2001, p. 86
5. ^ Cleman 1991, p. 623
6. ^ Quinn 1998, p. 312
7. ^ Silverman 1991, p. 172
8. ^ Rosenheim 1997, p. 75
9. ^ Jump up to:a b c Silverman 1991, p. 173
10. ^ Hoffman 1972, p. 110
11. ^ Poe 1927, p. 79
12. ^ Harrowitz 1984, pp. 186–187
13. ^ Poe 1927, pp. 82–83
14. ^ Harrowitz 1984, pp. 187–192
15. ^ Thoms 2002, pp. 133–134
16. ^ Kennedy 1987, p. 120
17. ^ Jump up to:a b Sova 2001, pp. 162–163
18. ^ Neimeyer 2002, p. 206
19. ^ Van Leer 1993, p. 65
20. ^ Cornelius 2002, p. 33
21. ^ Jump up to:a b c Silverman 1991, p. 174
22. ^ Kennedy 1987, p. 119
23. ^ Rosenheim 1997, p. 68
24. ^ Booker 2004, p. 507
25. ^ Merton 2006, p. 16
26. ^ Pérez Arranz 2018, pp. 112–114
27. ^ Autrey 1977, p. 193
28. ^ Autrey 1977, p. 188
29. ^ Laverty 1951, p. 221
30. ^ Cornelius 2002, p. 31
31. ^ Ousby 1972, p. 52
32. ^ Quinn 1998, p. 311
33. ^ Sova 2001, p. 162
34. ^ Ostram 1987, pp. 39,40
35. ^ Ostram 1987, p. 40
36. ^ Quinn 1998, p. 399
37. ^ Quinn 1998, pp. 465–466
38. ^ Sova 2001, p. 165
39. ^ Quinn 1998, p. 430
40. ^ Boll 1943, p. 302
41. ^ Miller 1974, pp. 46–47
42. ^ Jump up to:a b Quinn 1998, p. 517
43. ^ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0004367
44. ^ Hischak, Thomas S. (2012). American Literature on Stage and Screen. NC, USA: McFarland. p. 153. ISBN 978-0-7864-6842-3.
45. ^ https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2747564/
46. ^ https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1408118/

Sources
• Autrey, Max L. (May 1977). "Edgar Allan Poe's Satiric View of Evolution". Extrapolation. 18 (2): 186–199. doi:10.3828/extr.1977.18.2.186.
• Boll, Ernest (May 1943). "The Manuscript of 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' and Poe's Revisions". Modern Philology. 40 (4): 302–315. doi:10.1086/388587. S2CID 161841024.
• The Seven Basic Plots. Booker, Christopher (2004). The Seven Basic Plots. London: Continuum. ISBN 978-0-8264-8037-8.
• Cleman, John (December 1991). "Irresistible Impulses: Edgar Allan Poe and the Insanity Defense". American Literature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 63 (4): 623–640. doi:10.2307/2926871. JSTOR 2926871.
• Cornelius, Kay (2002), "Biography of Edgar Allan Poe", in Harold Bloom (ed.), Bloom's BioCritiques: Edgar Allan Poe, Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, ISBN 978-0-7910-6173-2
• Harrowitz, Nancy (1984), "The Body of the Detective Model: Charles S. Peirce and Edgar Allan Poe", in Umberto Eco; Thomas Sebeok (eds.), The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce, Bloomington, IN: History Workshop, Indiana University Press, pp. 179–197, ISBN 978-0-253-35235-4. Harrowitz discusses Dupin's method in the light of Charles Sanders Peirce's logic of making good guesses or abductive reasoning.
• Hoffman, Daniel (1972). Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 978-0-8071-2321-8.
• Kennedy, J. Gerald (1987). Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-03773-9.
• Laverty, Carol Dee (1951). Science and Pseudo-Science in the Writings of Edgar Allan Poe (PhD). Duke University.
• Merton, Robert K. (2006). The travels and adventures of serendipity : a study in sociological semantics and the sociology of science (Paperback ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. p. 16. ISBN [login to see] 302.
• Meyers, Jeffrey (1992). Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy (Paperback ed.). New York: Cooper Square Press. ISBN 978-0-8154-1038-6.
• Miller, John C. (December 1974). "The Exhumations and Reburials of Edgar and Virginia Poe and Mrs. Clemm". Poe Studies. vii (2): 46–47. doi:10.1111/j.1754-6095.1974.tb00236.x.
• Neimeyer, Mark (2002). "Poe and Popular Culture". In Hayes, Kevin J. (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 205–224. ISBN 978-0-521-79727-6.
• Pérez Arranz, Cristina (2018). Edgar Allan Poe desde la imaginación científica (PhD). Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
• Poe, Edgar Allan (1927), Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, New York: Walter J. Black
• Ostram, John Ward (1987). "Poe's Literary Labors and Rewards". Myths and Reality: The Mysterious Mr. Poe. Baltimore: The Edgar Allan Poe Society. pp. 37–47.
• Ousby, Ian V. K. (December 1972). "The Murders in the Rue Morgue and 'Doctor D'Arsac': A Poe Source". Poe Studies. V (2): 52. doi:10.1111/j.1754-6095.1972.tb00201.x.
• Quinn, Arthur Hobson (1998). Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-0-8018-5730-0.
• Rosenheim, Shawn James (1997). The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar Poe to the Internet. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-0-8018-5332-6.
• Silverman, Kenneth (1991). Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance (Paperback ed.). New York: Harper Perennial. ISBN 978-0-06-092331-0.
• Sova, Dawn B. (2001). Edgar Allan Poe A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work (Paperback ed.). New York: Checkmark Books. ISBN 978-0-8160-4161-9.
• Thoms, Peter (2002). "Poe's Dupin and the Power of Detection". In Hayes, Kevin J. (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 133–147. ISBN 978-0-521-79326-1.
• Van Leer, David (1993). "Detecting Truth: The World of the Dupin Tales". In Silverman, Kenneth (ed.). The American Novel: New Essays on Poe's Major Tales. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 65–92. ISBN 978-0-521-42243-7.
• Whalen, Terance (2001). "Poe and the American Publishing Industry". In Kennedy, J. Gerald (ed.). A Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-512150-6.

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Edgar Alan Poe, terror of the soul
A documentary covering the life and writings of Edgar Allen Poe, it is comprised of interviews with Poe scholars, dramatic sequences, and an adaptation of "The Cask of Amontillado".
Directed by Joyce Chopra and Karen Thomas
Cast: Eric Christmas, Sky Rumph, and Michelle Joyner.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW1WkuHUqc0

Images:
1. College and West Point Edgar Allen Poe
2. 1949 3c Edgar Allan Poe postage stamp - Scott #986.
3. Edgar Allan Poe in 1848
4. Virginia Clemm Poe first wife of Edgar Allan Poe

Background from {[https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/edgar-allan-poe]}
Edgar Allan Poe’s stature as a major figure in world literature is primarily based on his ingenious and profound short stories, poems, and critical theories, which established a highly influential rationale for the short form in both poetry and fiction. Regarded in literary histories and handbooks as the architect of the modern short story, Poe was also the principal forerunner of the “art for art’s sake” movement in 19th-century European literature. Whereas earlier critics predominantly concerned themselves with moral or ideological generalities, Poe focused his criticism on the specifics of style and construction that contributed to a work’s effectiveness or failure. In his own work, he demonstrated a brilliant command of language and technique as well as an inspired and original imagination. Poe’s poetry and short stories greatly influenced the French Symbolists of the late 19th century, who in turn altered the direction of modern literature.

Poe’s father and mother were professional actors. At the time of his birth in 1809, they were members of a repertory company in Boston. Before Poe was three years old both of his parents died, and he was raised in the home of John Allan, a prosperous exporter from Richmond, Virginia, who never legally adopted his foster son. As a boy, Poe attended the best schools available, and was admitted to the University of Virginia at Charlottesville in 1825. While there he distinguished himself academically but was forced to leave after less than a year because of bad debts and inadequate financial support from Allan. Poe’s relationship with Allan disintegrated upon his return to Richmond in 1827, and soon after Poe left for Boston, where he enlisted in the army and also published his first poetry collection, Tamerlane, and Other Poems. The volume went unnoticed by readers and reviewers, and a second collection, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, received only slightly more attention when it appeared in 1829. That same year Poe was honorably discharged from the army, having attained the rank of regimental sergeant major, and was then admitted to the United States Military Academy at West Point. However, because Allan would neither provide his foster son with sufficient funds to maintain himself as a cadet nor give the consent necessary to resign from the Academy, Poe gained a dismissal by ignoring his duties and violating regulations. He subsequently went to New York City, where Poems, his third collection of verse, was published in 1831, and then to Baltimore, where he lived at the home of his aunt, Mrs. Maria Clemm.

Over the next few years Poe’s first short stories appeared in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier and his “MS. Found in a Bottle” won a cash prize for best story in the Baltimore Saturday Visitor. Nevertheless, Poe was still not earning enough to live independently, nor did Allan’s death in 1834 provide him with an inheritance. The following year, however, his financial problems were temporarily alleviated when he accepted an editorship at The Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, bringing with him his aunt and his 12-year-old cousin Virginia, whom he married in 1836. The Southern Literary Messenger was the first of several journals Poe would direct over the next 10 years and through which he rose to prominence as a leading man of letters in America. Poe made himself known not only as a superlative author of poetry and fiction, but also as a literary critic whose level of imagination and insight had hitherto been unapproached in American literature. While Poe’s writings gained attention in the late 1830s and early 1840s, the profits from his work remained meager, and he supported himself by editing Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and Graham’s Magazine in Philadelphia and the Broadway Journal in New York City. After his wife’s death from tuberculosis in 1847, Poe became involved in a number of romantic affairs. It was while he prepared for his second marriage that Poe, for reasons unknown, arrived in Baltimore in late September of 1849. On October 3, he was discovered in a state of semi-consciousness; he died four days later without regaining the necessary lucidity to explain what had happened during the last days of his life.

Poe’s most conspicuous contribution to world literature derives from the analytical method he practiced both as a creative author and as a critic of the works of his contemporaries. His self-declared intention was to formulate strictly artistic ideals in a milieu that he thought overly concerned with the utilitarian value of literature, a tendency he termed the “heresy of the Didactic.” While Poe’s position includes the chief requisites of pure aestheticism, his emphasis on literary formalism was directly linked to his philosophical ideals: through the calculated use of language one may express, though always imperfectly, a vision of truth and the essential condition of human existence. Poe’s theory of literary creation is noted for two central points: first, a work must create a unity of effect on the reader to be considered successful; second, the production of this single effect should not be left to the hazards of accident or inspiration, but should to the minutest detail of style and subject be the result of rational deliberation on the part of the author. In poetry, this single effect must arouse the reader’s sense of beauty, an ideal that Poe closely associated with sadness, strangeness, and loss; in prose, the effect should be one revelatory of some truth, as in “tales of ratiocination” or works evoking “terror, or passion, or horror.”

Aside from a common theoretical basis, there is a psychological intensity that is characteristic of Poe’s writings, especially the tales of horror that comprise his best and best-known works. These stories—which include “The Black Cat,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”—are often told by a first-person narrator, and through this voice Poe probes the workings of a character’s psyche. This technique foreshadows the psychological explorations of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the school of psychological realism. In his Gothic tales, Poe also employed an essentially symbolic, almost allegorical method which gives such works as “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and “Ligeia” an enigmatic quality that accounts for their enduring interest and links them with the symbolical works of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. The influence of Poe’s tales may be seen in the work of later writers, including Ambrose Bierce and H.P. Lovecraft, who belong to a distinct tradition of horror literature initiated by Poe. In addition to his achievement as creator of the modern horror tale, Poe is also credited with parenting two other popular genres: science fiction and the detective story. In such works as “The Unparalleled Adventure of Hans Pfaall” and “Von Kempelen and His Discovery,” Poe took advantage of the fascination for science and technology that emerged in the early 19th century to produce speculative and fantastic narratives which anticipate a type of literature that did not become widely practiced until the 20th century. Similarly, Poe’s three tales of ratiocination—“The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Purloined Letter,” and “The Mystery of Marie Roget”—are recognized as the models which established the major characters and literary conventions of detective fiction, specifically the amateur sleuth who solves a crime that has confounded the authorities and whose feats of deductive reasoning are documented by an admiring associate. Just as Poe influenced many succeeding authors and is regarded as an ancestor of such major literary movements as Symbolism and Surrealism, he was also influenced by earlier literary figures and movements. In his use of the demonic and the grotesque, Poe evidenced the impact of the stories of E.T.A. Hoffman and the Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe, while the despair and melancholy in much of his writing reflects an affinity with the Romantic movement of the early 19th century. It was Poe’s particular genius that in his work he gave consummate artistic form both to his personal obsessions and those of previous literary generations, at the same time creating new forms which provided a means of expression for future artists.

While Poe is most often remembered for his short fiction, his first love as a writer was poetry, which he began writing during his adolescence. His early verse reflects the influence of such English romantics as Lord Byron, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, yet foreshadows his later poetry which demonstrates a subjective outlook and surreal, mystic vision. “Tamerlane” and “Al Aaraaf” exemplify Poe’s evolution from the portrayal of Byronic heroes to the depiction of journeys within his own imagination and subconscious. The former piece, reminiscent of Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” recounts the life and adventures of a 14th-century Mongol conqueror; the latter poem portrays a dreamworld where neither good nor evil permanently reside and where absolute beauty can be directly discerned. In other poems—“To Helen,” “Lenore,” and “The Raven” in particular—Poe investigates the loss of ideal beauty and the difficulty in regaining it. These pieces are usually narrated by a young man who laments the untimely death of his beloved. “To Helen” is a three stanza lyric that has been called one of the most beautiful love poems in the English language. The subject of the work is a woman who becomes, in the eyes of the narrator, a personification of the classical beauty of ancient Greece and Rome. “Lenore” presents ways in which the dead are best remembered, either by mourning or celebrating life beyond earthly boundaries. In “The Raven,” Poe successfully unites his philosophical and aesthetic ideals. In this psychological piece, a young scholar is emotionally tormented by a raven’s ominous repetition of “Nevermore” in answer to his question about the probability of an afterlife with his deceased lover. Charles Baudelaire noted in his introduction to the French edition of “The Raven”: “It is indeed the poem of the sleeplessness of despair; it lacks nothing: neither the fever of ideas, nor the violence of colors, nor sickly reasoning, nor drivelling terror, nor even the bizarre gaiety of suffering which makes it more terrible.” Poe also wrote poems that were intended to be read aloud. Experimenting with combinations of sound and rhythm, he employed such technical devices as repetition, parallelism, internal rhyme, alliteration, and assonance to produce works that are unique in American poetry for their haunting, musical quality. In “The Bells,” for example, the repetition of the word “bells” in various structures accentuates the unique tonality of the different types of bells described in the poem.

While his works were not conspicuously acclaimed during his lifetime, Poe did earn due respect as a gifted fiction writer, poet, and man of letters, and occasionally he achieved a measure of popular success, especially following the appearance of “The Raven.” After his death, however, the history of his critical reception becomes one of dramatically uneven judgments and interpretations. This state of affairs was initiated by Poe’s one-time friend and literary executor R.W. Griswold, who, in a libelous obituary notice in the New York Tribune bearing the byline “Ludwig,” attributed the depravity and psychological aberrations of many of the characters in Poe’s fiction to Poe himself. In retrospect, Griswold’s vilifications seem ultimately to have elicited as much sympathy as censure with respect to Poe and his work, leading subsequent biographers of the late 19th century to defend, sometimes too devotedly, Poe’s name. It was not until the 1941 biography by A.H. Quinn that a balanced view was provided of Poe, his work, and the relationship between the author’s life and his imagination. Nevertheless, the identification of Poe with the murderers and madmen of his works survived and flourished in the 20th century, most prominently in the form of psychoanalytical studies such as those of Marie Bonaparte and Joseph Wood Krutch. Added to the controversy over the sanity, or at best the maturity of Poe (Paul Elmer More called him “the poet of unripe boys and unsound men”), was the question of the value of Poe’s works as serious literature. At the forefront of Poe’s detractors were such eminent figures as Henry James, Aldous Huxley, and T.S. Eliot, who dismissed Poe’s works as juvenile, vulgar, and artistically debased; in contrast, these same works have been judged to be of the highest literary merit by such writers as Bernard Shaw and William Carlos Williams. Complementing Poe’s erratic reputation among English and American critics is the more stable, and generally more elevated opinion of critics elsewhere in the world, particularly in France. Following the extensive translations and commentaries of Charles Baudelaire in the 1850s, Poe’s works were received with a peculiar esteem by French writers, most profoundly those associated with the late 19th-century movement of Symbolism, who admired Poe’s transcendent aspirations as a poet; the 20th-century movement of Surrealism, which valued Poe’s bizarre and apparently unruled imagination; and such figures as Paul Valéry, who found in Poe’s theories and thought an ideal of supreme rationalism. In other countries, Poe’s works have enjoyed a similar regard, and numerous studies have been written tracing the influence of the American author on the international literary scene, especially in Russia, Japan, Scandinavia, and Latin America.

Today, Poe is recognized as one of the foremost progenitors of modern literature, both in its popular forms, such as horror and detective fiction, and in its more complex and self-conscious forms, which represent the essential artistic manner of the 20th century. In contrast to earlier critics who viewed the man and his works as one, criticism of the past 25 years has developed a view of Poe as a detached artist who was more concerned with displaying his virtuosity than with expressing his soul, and who maintained an ironic rather than an autobiographical relationship to his writings. While at one time critics such as Yvor Winters wished to remove Poe from literary history, his works remain integral to any conception of modernism in world literature. Herbert Marshall McLuhan wrote in an essay entitled “Edgar Poe’s Tradition”: “While the New England dons primly turned the pages of Plato and Buddha beside a tea-cozy, and while Browning and Tennyson were creating a parochial fog for the English mind to relax in, Poe never lost contact with the terrible pathos of his time. Coevally with Baudelaire, and long before Conrad and Eliot, he explored the heart of darkness.”

FYI LTC John Shaw 1SG Steven ImermanGySgt Gary CordeiroSMSgt Tom BurnsSgt Jim BelanusSGM Bill FrazerSGT Randell Rose[SGT Denny EspinosaA1C Riley SandersSSgt Clare MaySSG Robert WebsterCSM Chuck StaffordPFC Craig KarshnerSFC Bernard WalkoSPC Nancy GreenePVT Mark Zehner Lt Col Charlie BrownSP5 Dennis Loberger SSG Robert Mark Odom 1LT Peter Duston

He was an influential writer. Many writers, like Dostoyevsky, used the detective genre to their advantage! SSG Samuel Kermon

SGT (Join to see) I have read some of Dostoyevsky, when I was in college, "The Brothers Karamatzov".