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For over 150 years, legions of scholars, literary people, journalists and general Poe devotees have tried to capture Edgar Allan Poe’s complex personality and enshrine it forever in paper and ink. They have exhaustively chased every conceivable source to fill in the details of his life. Every person who met Poe (or was willing to claim so), and was still alive after 1875, was coerced to recall any scrap of fact or insight, no matter how trivial or vague. After these people had passed on, their children and even grandchildren were asked to repeat anything they had heard about Poe. From this mass of disjointed and often contradictory information, Poe’s biography has been crafted, each generation relying heavily on the work of prior biographers, themselves often happy to steal from their competitors without so much as a footnote. Every letter he wrote, every note he jotted on a piece of paper, every photograph, every newspaper or magazine article, every building, stick of wood or piece of bric-a-brac with a Poe association was duly collected, catalogued and interpreted — but Poe himself has fooled us all and remains to this day an elusive quarry.
The peculiar curiosity of the reader in the life and character of the writer has long been recognized. Nearly 100 years before Poe was even born, Joseph Addison commented in the opening lines of the first issue of The Spectator: “I have observed, that a reader seldom peruses a book with pleasure, till he knows whether the writer of it be a black or a fair man, of a mild or choleric disposition, married or a bachelor, with other particulars of the like nature, that conduce very much to the right understanding of an author” (Joseph Addison, The Spectator, No. I, March 1, 1711).
In Poe’s case, there is a great deal of information, but very few verifiable facts. Everything about him is controversial, literally from the place and date of his birth to the exact location and date of his burial. There is no birth certificate, and although Poe seems to have known that he was born in Boston in 1809, most biographies claimed until 1880 that he was born in Baltimore in 1811. Poe himself once even gave 1813 as the date, two years after his mother’s death. As for Poe’s burial, both October 8 and 9 have been recorded. Since no headstone was placed over Poe’s grave when he was buried, some sources have claimed it as to the right of his grandfather, others to the left. Poe himself began this confusion of fact and fancy in his own brief autobiographical note, provided to R. W. Griswold for The Poets and Poetry of America (1842). Among the numerous inaccuracies is the fable that Poe joined the Greeks in their fight for liberty in 1828. (While at West Point, the jokester Poe merrily spread rumors that he was the grandson of Benedict Arnold.)
Reducing the life and personality of any person to a static sequence of words is not an easy task. In one way or another, all such attempts fail to achieve this lofty goal. Any historical figure is particularly difficult to understand, and Poe has further muddied the waters himself by carefully manipulating his own public image to help sell his writings, or for personal reasons that are no longer always clear to us. It is hard enough to record with any certainty where Poe was and what he was doing at any given time, let alone what he was thinking or how he felt. The reasonableness inherent in this warning does not, however, give pause to the biographer, who will glance at a person’s shadow and confidently describe the color of the pen stuffed in the caster’s inside coat pocket. An offhand comment, for example, made once in idle conversation, but still remembered (accurately or not) fifty years later, is presented by biographers as the subject’s definitive and lifelong position on the matter.
Understandably, biographers are reluctant to admit the dark secrets of their craft. Many are unaware of the extent that the final product is shaped by their own personal biases and the unspoken but still very real mandate of the reader to find the presentation cohesive and, above all, interesting. To achieve these goals, biographers frequently supplement the available historical information with interpretations of Poe’s personality gleaned from his writings, an act of desperation that ignores the fact that Poe’s writings are more the result of his imagination than his personality. It is a common error for readers to confuse Poe’s narrators with Poe himself, but trained scholars should know better.
Was Poe drunk when he was found on the street in Baltimore on October 3, 1849? Dr. J. Evans Snodgrass, the man who sent Poe to the hospital in a carriage, said in 1856 and 1867 that Poe was indeed intoxicated. Dr. John J. Moran, however, Poe’s attending physician for the final few days of his life, insisted in 1875 and 1885 that Poe had no trace of alcohol in his system and had probably been beaten by thugs. Both of these men, having endured whatever passed as medical training in those days, are equally credible witnesses. Moran has the advantage of having spent more time examining Poe, but he has partially discredited himself by leaving us at least three romanticized and somewhat contradictory accounts. (Moran also apparently told the Rev. W. T. D. Clemm in 1849 that Poe had indeed been intoxicated, although this account is related third hand many years later and has few supporting details.) Snodgrass, having left a more coherent account, has generally been accepted by biographers, but he was a radical temperance man and saw in Poe’s death a means of persuading others to abandon alcohol entirely. He may have exaggerated his claims to bolster his own moral position. (Indeed, his first article was written for the Woman’s Temperance Paper of New York City.) He may also simply have been wrong. Curiously, Snodgrass misquoted Walker’s important note describing Poe’s condition, changing “a gentleman, rather the worse for wear” first to “deep intoxication” and later to “beastly intoxication.” With only such imperfect information at hand, whichever account one accepts necessarily depends more on bias and whim than reason.
As another example of this problem, Poe left Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine in June of 1840. Poe claimed privately that he left over a point of honor, Burton having advertised an open literary contest with the winner already secretly selected. Burton, however, quickly spread vague rumors that Poe was fired for irresponsible behavior, but offered no proof. Since there is no absolute evidence to substantiate either position, which you choose depends on which you believe. The real question is whether a biographer should choose at all. Instead, is he or she not obligated to report both stories as an impartial observer?
The wide variance among interpretations of Poe’s life can be seen clearly in the three most prominent “camps,” each here named for its originator: The “Griswold Camp” (which vilifies Poe as a devil), the “Ingram Camp” (which glorifies Poe as an angel) and the “Baudelaire Camp” (which glorifies Poe as a devil). To some extent, nearly all biographies of Poe follow or react to this triangle of approaches.
The following items are some of the many biographical books and articles written about Poe. Items listed have been included because they are important, influential or representative examples. Their presence here should not be considered an endorsement of their contents.
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Early Biographies of Poe (listed chronologically):
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Modern Biographies of Poe (listed chronologically):
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Other Biographies of Poe (listed by author):
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Other Biographical Material (listed by author):
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[S:1 - JAS] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - General Topics - Edgar Allan Poe's Problematic Biography