Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston on 19 January 1809 to two touring actors, Eliza and David Poe. His father left the family, his mother died in Richmond, Virginia, before he was three, and he was taken in by a Richmond merchant, John Allan, and his wife, Frances. He was never formally adopted. The family spent five years in Britain, where Poe went to school, and later he had a single term at the University of Virginia in 1826 before debts and quarrels with Allan ended it. He enlisted in the army under an assumed name, rose to sergeant major, entered West Point in 1830 and got himself dismissed the following year.

By then he had published three small books of poems, and he spent the rest of his life trying to live by writing. It was mostly magazine work: editing, reviewing and supplying tales, first at the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, then at Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and Graham’s Magazine in Philadelphia, and later in New York. In 1836 he married his cousin Virginia Clemm, who was thirteen. The fame he did achieve came suddenly with “The Raven” in 1845, but it paid very little. Virginia died of tuberculosis in January 1847. Poe died in Baltimore on 7 October 1849, after being found delirious in the street, and the cause of his death is still argued over.

Poe’s importance to horror is enormous and fairly easy to pin down. He took the Gothic novel’s machinery of crypts, curses and ancestral houses and compressed it into stories short enough to read at one sitting. In an 1842 review of Hawthorne he argued that a tale should be built from its first sentence toward a single effect. He also moved the horror inside the narrator’s head. Many of his best stories are confessions by men who insist they are perfectly sane, like The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat. Along the way he invented the detective story with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) and wrote some of the first American science fiction.

The fifteen Poe stories on Daily Creepypasta cover most of his range. The Fall of the House of Usher and Ligeia are the high Gothic ones, all dread and atmosphere. The Cask of Amontillado and The Tell-Tale Heart are the tight, cruel ones. MS. Found in a Bottle and A Descent into the Maelström are sea stories, and The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar is a deadpan hoax that still turns stomachs. Each has a Reader’s Companion with notes on where and when it first appeared.