My Notes on Edgar Allan Poe, 

In reality, Poe was never a suspect in any murder case, nor did he help the police solve any crime. He did write a story based on a real murder case called “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt," in which he used his fictional detective, C. Auguste Dupin, to analyze the clues and propose a solution. In his story, his solution was wrong in reality ( or was it—Poe never named the killer; he only gave the initials W.W.G. ), and the actual killer confessed on his deathbed in 1849, shortly before Poe’s own death. The killer was William W. Gantt, a former Baltimore police officer and journalist who had a romantic interest in the victim, Marie Rogêt, aka Mary Rogers.

Poe's stories had an impact on the development of detective fiction and crime solving because they introduced the reasoning, observation, and deduction techniques that both fictional and actual detectives still use today. However, Poe himself was never directly involved in any criminal investigations.

William W. Gantt 
The Mystery of “The Mystery of Marie Roget”

When we say that Edgar Allan Poe invented the detective story, we may as well say that Poe invented the detective. In 1841, when “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” were first published in Graham Magazine, Boston Police was five years away from founding the first professional police detective unit in the United States. Indeed, Poe established one of the genre's most enduring tropes when he created the character C. Auguste Dupin to solve mysteries using "ratiocination," or the powers of reasoning: a civilian solves a mystery without an obvious solution because they enjoy the thrill and challenge of the puzzle.

Edgar Allan Poe
and the
Baltimore Police Department

Edgar Allan Poe revolutionized the literary genre of mystery with his story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” He created the first fictional detective who solved crimes by using logic and observation rather than intuition, community support, or luck.

Poe’s life and work were full of mystery and drama, as some movies have shown. They imagined him as both a target and a solver of crimes, using his own fiction as a guide. These stories were not true, but they added to the appeal and mystery of Poe’s legacy. Poe’s stories also had a real impact on crime solving, as they inspired many detectives to follow his logic and style. Poe not only created a character; he also shaped a profession that has been using his techniques for almost 200 years. Poe’s influence also reached other writers, such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who created one of the most famous fictional detectives, Sherlock Holmes.

According to some accounts, Poe was found unconscious and delirious in a tavern in Baltimore on October 3, 1849, by a man named Joseph W. Walker, who was a printer and a member of the Fourth Ward Watch, a volunteer police force. Walker sent a note to Poe’s friend, Dr. Joseph E. Snodgrass, asking for help. Snodgrass arrived and saw that Poe was wearing someone else’s clothes and was in a state of "beastly intoxication." He took Poe to the Washington College Hospital, where Poe died four days later. The exact cause of Poe’s condition and death remains a mystery, but some theories suggest that he was a victim of cooping, a form of electoral fraud in which people were kidnapped, drugged, and forced to vote multiple times for a certain candidate. The tavern where Poe was found was a polling place for the 1849 Baltimore mayoral election, and Poe’s strange clothes could have been used to disguise him as a different voter.

However, Poe was also involved in a murder case that he helped solve with his detective fiction. In 1842, Poe published “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt," a sequel to his first detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” The story was based on the real-life murder of Mary Cecilia Rogers, a cigar shop employee who was found dead in the Hudson River in New York in 1841. Poe used the details of the case, which was widely reported in the newspapers, and transposed them to Paris, where his fictional detective, C. Auguste Dupin, solved the mystery by using his analytical skills and newspaper clippings. Poe claimed that his solution was correct and that he knew the identity of the murderer, but he never revealed it publicly.

However, in 1849, a few months before Poe’s death, a man named William W. Gantt confessed to the murder of Mary Rogers on his deathbed. Gantt was a former Baltimore police officer who had moved to New York and became a journalist. He had met Rogers at her shop and had a romantic relationship with her. He admitted that he had taken her on a boat ride and had killed her in a fit of jealousy. He also said that he had read Poe’s story and was amazed by how close Poe had come to the truth. Gantt’s confession was published in the New York Herald on October 7, 1849, the same day that Poe died in Baltimore. It is unknown if Poe ever learned of Gantt’s confession or if he had any connection to him.

Poe’s death and his involvement in the murder case have inspired many works of fiction and non-fiction, such as The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl, The Pale Blue Eye by Louis Bayard, and The Poe Museum by Edward Pettit.

THE PASSING OF POE
What really happened to the master of the macabre in the days leading up to his death here 174 years ago?

By DOUG BIRCH

PUBLISHED: October 2, 1994
UPDATED: October 24, 2018

Death has reared himself a throne... In a strange city, lying alone

On a balmy Friday in late September 1849, a middle-aged man with curly brown hair and deep pouches under his eyes stood among the passengers of a smoke- and cinder-belching steamship as it slid into Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.

No diary, letter, or newspaper article recorded his arrival. But it’s likely he wore his trademark threadbare black suit with a boutonniere and black bow tie. He probably held a Malacca cane, which he was later found clutching.

As he stepped off the ship, perhaps the ancient side-wheeler Pocahontas, he may have plunged into the mob of hansom cab drivers and hotel hawkers that often greeted visitors at the wharves.

One thing is certain: On Sept. 28, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe vanished into the city’s crowded, noisy, and dangerous streets.

Five days later, he was discovered muttering incoherently and dressed in filthy, outlandish clothes in the first-floor saloon of a hotel in what is now Little Italy. Taken by friends to a hospital in East Baltimore, he spent nearly four days wrestling with invisible demons.

Before dawn on Sunday, Oct. 7—145 years ago this week—the acclaimed writer died with a hoarse plea: “Lord, help my poor soul.”

It was a fitting coda to a remarkable, troubled life.

An author of horror tales about premature burials and corpses springing to life, Poe himself died in a mental maelstrom of confusion and terror.

With the publication of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in 1841, he invented the genre of detective fiction. Yet he left few clues about the events that led to his own death—a puzzle that has intrigued, divided, and stumped historians, fans, and critics for almost a century and a half.

According to Jeffrey Savoye, the secretary of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, "his mystery attracts people who are interested in Poe." “His death is so shrouded by so much disinformation and lack of information that we don’t know why he died, and we’ll probably never know.”

Yet Poe’s death amounts to more than just a mystery tale or an antique celebrity scandal. It resembles a faded family album, full of disturbingly familiar faces.

There are fading images of a city scarred by violence. Daguerreotypes of a society split by ethnic divisions. And an intimate portrait of a prodigious talent tragically destroyed, or foolishly squandered—but in any event, lost.

“There are some secrets that do not permit themselves to be told.”

From “The Man of the Crowd”

Born in Boston, where his parents were working as actors, Edgar Allan Poe was orphaned before he was 2 years old.

After his mother died, he was raised in the household of John Allan, a wealthy merchant in Richmond, Va. John Allan fed and clothed Edgar and paid to send him to school. But he never adopted the boy, and the pair began to quarrel as Poe grew older. Ultimately, they fought over Poe’s college debts and career plans, which severed relations.

After stints as a student at the University of Virginia, as an Army recruit, and as a cadet at West Point, Poe moved to Baltimore, where he lived with relatives.

This is where he struggled to launch his writing career. This is probably where, in 1835, he married his 13-year-old first cousin, Virginia. After a few years, the restless artist moved on to work as an editor, critic, and writer in Richmond, Philadelphia, and New York.

When Poe arrived here on Friday, Sept. 28, 1849, he was a 40-year-old widower and an accomplished man of letters. The internationally known author of the poem “The Raven” was a master of Gothic fiction and one of the most prominent literary critics of his day.

The stop in Baltimore was expected to be brief. In Richmond, Poe had proposed to a wealthy widow—a childhood sweetheart—then set off for New York, probably to pack up his things for the move to Virginia.

He had taken a steamer to Baltimore, then planned to continue north by train, stopping in Philadelphia long enough to edit a book of poetry by the wife of a piano manufacturer and collect a $100 fee.

The author had much to look forward to: his coming marriage, the move from New York to his boyhood home of Richmond, and his long-delayed plans to launch a literary magazine.

But he was also a troubled man.

In an age before effective copyright laws, Poe was chronically broke and forced to borrow small sums of money. His wife's death from tuberculosis two years earlier still troubled him. He was in poor health and sometimes drank excessively. A few weeks before leaving Richmond, he joined the Sons of Temperance and swore never to drink alcohol again.

Throughout his life, he quarreled with bosses, had trouble holding onto a job, and frequently moved from city to city. Weeks of lassitude would follow months of overwork.

In November 1848, he tried to commit suicide with an overdose of laudanum, or liquid opium.

“I have been terribly depressed since birth,” Poe wrote to a friend the year he died. “I cannot express to you how terribly I have been suffering from gloom. . . . I am full of dark foreboding. Nothing cheers or comforts me. My life seems wasted, the future a dreary blank.”

“Once upon a midnight dreary . . . “

From “The Raven”

Wednesday, Oct. 3, 1849, brought rain and an early chill to Baltimore. Smoke curled from chimneys. It was Election Day for members of Congress and the state legislature, and men sloshed through the streets to the city’s polling places, many of them neighborhood saloons.

That afternoon, Joseph W. Walker, a Baltimore Sun compositor, dove into Gunner’s Hall, a hotel and tavern on Lombard Street owned by a man named Ryan. Fourth Ward voters and patrons mingled in the tavern, located just east of the Jones Falls in present-day Little Italy.

Walker talked to a raggedly dressed man. Shocked at the man’s condition, he scribbled a note and dispatched it to Dr. Joseph Evans Snodgrass, a physician who lived on nearby High Street.

“Dear Sir: There is a gentleman, rather the worse for wear, at Ryan’s 4th ward polls who goes under the cognomen of Edgar A. Poe and who appears in great distress, and he says he is acquainted with you, and I assure you, he is in need of immediate assistance.

“Yours in haste, Jos. W. Walker.”

Snodgrass, once editor of the Baltimore Saturday Visiter and a longtime friend of the poet, later recalled that when he arrived, Poe sat slumped in a chair with “an aspect of vacant stupidity that made me shudder.” On his head was a “cheap palm-leaf” hat; around his shoulders, a second-hand coat. He wore dingy and badly fitting pants and a rumpled, soiled shirt. He had a Malacca cane.

Poe mumbled and seemed almost paralyzed.

The doctor tried to rent a room upstairs for the sick man, but the hotel was full. About this time, Henry Herring, a well-off lumber dealer and Virginia Poe’s uncle, walked in. He offered to help his nephew-in-law, but refused to take the sick man home with him. In the past, Herring said, Poe had abused him and been ungrateful for his help—presumably when Poe was drunk.

So Snodgrass and others carried Poe into a horse-drawn cab, which took him to what was then called the Washington Medical College and is now Church Hospital—at the crest of Broadway in East Baltimore.

Dr. John J. Moran, the young resident physician, put his patient in a second-floor room with a view of Fells Point, Locust Point, and the harbor.

There, Poe passed out.

“It was the most noisome quarter... where everything wore the worst impression of the most deplorable poverty and of the most desperate crime... Horrible filth festered in the dammed-up gutters. The whole atmosphere teemed with desolation.”

From “The Man of the Crowd”

What happened between the time Poe left the docks on Friday and that next Wednesday when he wound up in Gunner’s, just a few blocks east? No first-hand accounts survive about his five days missing in Baltimore. Rumor and speculation have filled the void.

It’s clear, though, that in 1849, Baltimore’s streets were dangerous places for a stranger to wander.

A noisy, restless, and rapidly growing city of 169,000 residents, Baltimore was one of the nation’s largest urban centers and a commercial hub of the booming South. Iron foundries pumped smoke skyward. A forest of ship masts jammed the Inner Harbor. Merchants peddled goods from Pratt Street warehouses or clapboard storefronts lining Baltimore Street.

Baltimore was just beginning to acquire its rich ethnic texture. Irish immigrants came to escape the potato famine of 1845–1849. German political dissidents arrived at the docks, fleeing repression after the collapse of their country’s 1848 liberal revolution. By 1850, about one out of five Baltimoreans was born overseas.

The city’s population of free blacks and fugitive slaves was one of the nation’s largest and was growing rapidly. Still, slave traders were busy here. Coffles of chained men, women, and children were sometimes marched through downtown streets.

Immigrants competed for scarce jobs with free blacks and migrants from America’s rural areas.

Knots of young men loitered around saloons or the streets. Whiskey was cheap and generally more potent than it is today. Temperance advocates, meanwhile, battled the bottle with a righteous vigor.

Neighborhood gangs, usually made up of members of a single ethnic group, flourished. Adopting names like the Eighth Ward Blaggards, the Red Necks, and Butt Enders, they attacked rival gangs or unlucky bystanders, employing fists, clubs, knives, and pistols.

Many gang members also worked as firemen in the city’s numerous private companies, which raced each other to blazes. Sometimes, while the building burned, competing companies would battle for the right to fight the fire and the right to collect the insurance company’s fee for dousing the flames. Firefighters were even suspected of committing arson to drum up business.

A handful of police officers and night watchmen struggled to cope with the growing violence. In five years, the city jail population will grow by 40 percent.

Violence escalated during the election season. And Poe was unlucky enough to arrive here during a fierce political battle.

The Whig Party had controlled Maryland politics for the previous decade but saw its grip slip. Democrats, meanwhile, aggressively recruited immigrants and were gradually eroding their rivals’ power.

As in most major American cities in the early 19th century, election fraud was widespread in Baltimore. One popular form of ballot rigging was called “cooping.”

A few days before Election Day, gangs of thugs roved the city, rounding up drunkards and the homeless. They furnished their captives with liquor and food and kept them in a basement or back room, like chickens in a coop. On Election Day, these hapless citizens were herded to the polls to vote repeatedly for the candidates of the party that sponsored the gang.

There were no voters’ lists. Balloting was done with color-coded cards, so there was nothing secret about it. Election judges, who were charged with challenging the qualifications of suspicious voters, were often bribed to look the other way, says Robert I. Cottam Jr., a Baltimore historian who has studied the politics and gang violence of the era.

By some accounts, there was a notorious Whig coop in the rear of an old firehouse on High Street, near Gunner’s saloon.

Poe—injured, sick, drunk, or perhaps just vulnerable-looking—was scooped from the streets by a gang and carried off to their coop, some biographers and historians strongly suspect.

On Election Day, Oct. 3, he and his fellow captives most likely would have been roused and herded over to Gunner’s, where they would have been told to vote the Whig ballot. That being done, Poe would have been sent back to his coop, told to swap clothes, and then herded out to vote again. The exchange of clothing was supposed to make it harder for opponents at the polls to spot the fraud, Mr. Cottam said.

Critics of the cooping theory have sometimes objected that Poe had too many fans, friends, and relatives in Baltimore to permit him to be marched through the streets without being recognized and rescued.

In the days before television, however, celebrities were not so easily recognized. And it seems hard to account for Poe’s strange attire in any other way.

Many scholars find the cooping theory very persuasive. In his 1934 biography of Poe, the scholar Hervey Allen called it “by far the most probable explanation of what happened.” Jean Baker, a historian at Goucher College who has written about the politics of pre-Civil War Baltimore, agreed.

“The people who like Poe as a writer really don’t like this story of cooping,” she said. But, she insisted, the circumstantial evidence seems strong. “It’s more than just sort of the myth of Edgar Allan Poe, which would fit nicely with his life.”

“I was sick — sick unto death with that long agony. . . . “

“The Pit and the Pendulum.”

After the polls closed that evening, triumphant partisans lit bonfires in the streets and set off gunpowder charges.

Poe saw and heard none of this. From the time he was taken to Washington Medical College until before dawn the next day, Thursday, Oct. 4, the author lay unconscious in his room.

He woke to a nightmare.

Delirious, shaking, and drenched in perspiration, he began to babble, talking with “spectral and imaginary objects on the walls,” Moran, the resident physician, reported. For more than 24 hours, he remained restless and incoherent.

Then, on Friday afternoon, Poe was able to talk to Moran, although he was still confused. He said that he had a wife in Richmond. To soothe his patient, Dr. Moran said Poe would soon be staying with friends.

“At this he broke out with much energy,” Moran reported in a letter written weeks later, “and said the best thing his best friend could do would be to blow out his brains with a pistol.”

Poe dozed, then lapsed back into a “violent delirium.” At one point, two nurses had to hold him down.

By Saturday evening, he began shouting the name "Reynolds" and kept it up for several hours. (To this day, Reynolds’ identity remains a mystery.)

Exhausted, finally, he grew silent.

Shortly after 3 a.m. on Sunday, Oct. 7, Poe turned his head and died.

“We tremble with the violence of the conflict within us—of the definite with the indefinite—of the substance with the shadow. But if the contest has proceeded thus far, it is the shadow

which prevails—we struggle in vain.”

“The Imp of the Perverse”

Biographers and others have blamed Poe’s death on various things: alcohol withdrawal, injury, or illness. Whatever the direct cause, his last months seemed haunted by the shadow of self-destruction.

“This death was almost a suicide, a suicide prepared for a long time,” wrote Charles Baudelaire, the French poet and Poe’s fervent admirer.

Poe’s mother-in-law, Marie Poe Clemm, decided, after talking to friends here, that the writer had run into some former classmates from West Point, who urged him to break his temperance pledge with a fateful toast of champagne.

John Pendleton Kennedy, a Baltimore lawyer and early patron of Poe, came to a similar conclusion. He noted in his diary entry for Oct. 10, 1849, that “Poe fell in with some companion here who seduced him to the bottle.”

“The consequence,” he wrote, “was fever, delirium, and madness.”

Snodgrass, a trained physician and the city’s leading lTC temperance advocate, wrote years later that, when he found Poe in Gunner’s saloon, the poet was “utterly stupefied with liquor.”

The New York Herald reported in October 1849 that Poe died during an attack of mania a’ potu—delirium tremens, the chills, pains, fever, and hallucinations that come with alcohol withdrawal.

Poe’s fans resisted this conclusion then, and they resist it now. His defenders portray him as a level-headed man, often down on his luck, whose character is too often confused with the tortured, self-destructive figures who populated his Gothic tales and poetry.

Some defenders suggest Poe may have been robbed and beaten. Others say illness felled him. Jeffrey Jerome, curator of the Edgar Allan Poe House in Baltimore, thinks the author suffered from diabetes or a heart condition. Poe, he said, probably collapsed on a Baltimore street and was picked up by passersby and taken into Gunner’s Hall for shelter.

Poe’s reputation as a drinker, his defenders say, is false, or at least grossly exaggerated. It grew, they say, out of a malicious 1850 memoir by his bitter literary rival, the Rev. Rufus W. Griswold.

Yet there is no question that Poe drank, sometimes with disastrous results.

“I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I so madly indulge,” he once wrote. “It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have perilled life, reputation, and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, some a sense of insupportable loneliness, and the dread of some strange, impending doom.”

“Ye who read are still among the living; but I who write shall have long since gone my way into the region of shadows.”

From "Shadow: A Parable”

On Monday, October 8, the author's dejected little funeral cortege—a hearse and a single carriage—bubbled through the rain along the cobblestone streets from the hospital on Broadway across town to the Presbyterian cemetery at Fayette and Greene streets.

The lumber dealer, Henry Herring, provided a mahogany coffin.

About 10 mourners gathered for the hastily arranged ceremony, including the undertaker. The Rev. William T. D. Clemm, a relative of Poe’s late wife, said a few words. Mourners lowered the coffin. In all, the service took about three minutes.

That same morning, the sun carried this obituary:

“DEATH OF EDGAR A. POE. — We regret to learn that Edgar A. Poe, Esq., the distinguished American poet, scholar, and critic, died in this city yesterday morning after an illness of four or five days. This announcement, coming so suddenly and unexpectedly, will cause poignant regret among all who admire genius and have sympathy for the frailties too often attending it. . . . “

The Mystery of Edgar Allan Poe's Death

Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site

No subject regarding Edgar Allan Poe ignites as much controversy as his sudden death at the age of forty, which remains shrouded in mystery. What we know is that Poe planned a trip from Richmond, Virginia, to New York City, during which he traveled by steamer and stopped in Baltimore on September 28, 1849. His actions and whereabouts throughout the next five days are uncertain.

Was Alcohol Involved?

On October 3, 1849, printer Joseph Walker found Poe inside or near Gunner's Hall tavern and sent a note for J.E. Snodgrass, one of Poe’s acquaintances in Baltimore. Walker described Poe as appearing in "great distress.”

Snodgrass noted that the clothes Poe wore looked disheveled and out of place: "he had evidently been robbed of his [own] clothing or cheated in an exchange." Snodgrass and his uncle, Henry Herring, both presumed that Poe was in a drunken state and agreed to send him to Washington College Hospital. Once there, Poe was taken to a room reserved for patients who were ill due to intoxication.

Poe lapsed in and out of consciousness for the next few days, and according to Dr. John J. Moran, who questioned Poe about his condition, Poe's answers were incoherent and unsatisfactory. Moran also prevented visitors due to Poe’s “excitable” condition.

Moran later noted in a letter to Maria Clemm, Poe’s mother-in-law, that during a period of consciousness, Poe held "vacant converse with spectral and imaginary objects on the walls. His face was pale, and his whole person was drenched in perspiration." Poe died quietly before sunrise on Sunday, October 7, 1849.

It may be logical to assume that alcohol played a role in Poe's death, given that it intermittently surfaced as a negative influence during his adult life. But how does it explain why Poe was wearing somebody else's clothes? Nor does it provide any insight into the circumstances that caused him to be found in such an unfortunate state.

Was Poe a Victim of Cooping?

One of the most popular theories about Poe’s death stems from the fact that Poe was found on Election Day, and Gunner’s Hall was a polling location. It is possible that on that day, Poe fell victim to cooping, a common method of voter fraud in the 19th century. Cooping victims were kidnapped, drugged or forced to drink, and disguised several times in order to cast several votes. Others have suggested that perhaps Poe was beaten and robbed, or even that he contracted rabies.

Theories abound about Poe’s death, but there has yet to be one that proves definitive—a fittingly mysterious end for the master of mystery.

 

Poe's History Life and Death
"I had walled the monster up within the tomb!"

Described as horrifying, mystifying, and brilliant, Poe’s writing has engaged readers all over the globe. The six years Edgar Allan Poe lived in Philadelphia were his happiest and most productive. Yet Poe also struggled with bad luck, personal demons, and his wife’s illness. In Poe’s humble home, reflect on the human spirit surmounting crushing obstacles and celebrate Poe’s astonishing creativity.

Early Life

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston in 1809. Both of his parents were actors. His mother, the much-admired Elizabeth Arnold Poe, was a talented actress. His father, David Poe, was considered less talented. The Poes performed at theaters throughout the Eastern Seaboard, from Boston to Virginia. In 1811, Elizabeth Poe died of tuberculosis in Richmond, Virginia, leaving orphaned Edgar, his infant sister Rosalie, and his older brother Henry. David Poe apparently abandoned his wife and children earlier and was not present when she died.

Different families separated and raised the three children. The successful Richmond businessman John Allan and his frail wife Frances took Edgar in. The Allans had no children of their own. They raised Edgar as part of the family and gave him their middle name, but never legally adopted him.

In 1815, Edgar traveled with the Allans to England and Scotland, where John Allan planned to expand his tobacco business. Edgar attended boarding schools throughout the five years the family lived overseas. After John Allan’s business venture failed, he moved the family back to Richmond, Virginia, in 1820.

From University of Virginia to West Point

Edgar continued his studies in Richmond. He entered the University of Virginia in 1826 at the age of 17. During the year he attended the university, Edgar excelled in his studies of Latin and French. He was unable to complete his studies at the university because Allan refused to pay debts Edgar had incurred during the school year. Allan and Edgar quarreled over the debts, of which a large portion was incurred from gambling.

Shortly after his quarrel with his foster father, Edgar Allan Poe left Richmond for Boston, where he hoped to pursue a literary career. His first book of poetry, Tamerlane and Other Poems, was published there. Unable to support himself and receiving little assistance from his foster father, Poe enlisted as a private in the US Army on May 26, 1827, for a five-year term. He entered under an assumed name and lied about his age, claiming to be 22 years old when he was only 18. Poe was assigned to Battery H of the First Artillery at Fort Independence in Boston Harbor. On October 31, 1827, Battery H was ordered to Fort Moultrie to protect Charleston Harbor. He sailed on the Brigantine Waltham, arriving for duty in Charleston on November 18.

At Fort Moultrie, Poe was promoted to artificer, the rank of a noncommissioned officer or enlisted man who had a mechanical specialty. On December 11, 1828, Poe’s battery sailed for duty at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, where he attained the rank of Sergeant-Major, the highest possible rank for a non-commissioned officer. His quick progress up the ranks can be attributed to his education, high social standing, and competence. Despite his accomplishments, Poe left military service in April 1829 and hired a substitute to complete his obligation. 

A brief reconciliation between Poe and Allan occurred upon the death of Frances Allan in 1829. Allan assisted Poe in obtaining a discharge from the regular Army and an appointment as a cadet at the US Military Academy in West Point. Poe experienced restlessness once more as he entered West Point in July 1830. One of his roommates described him as having “the appearance of being much older. He had a worn, weary, discontented look, not easily forgotten by those who were intimate with him.” The financial hardship, along with the realization that literature was his true vocation, led to Poe’s decision to resign from the academy. Allan, as Poe's guardian, refused to give him permission to resign. Unable to obtain permission to resign, Poe chose to neglect his duties and was court-martialed for “gross neglect of duty” and “disobedience of orders.”

Editor and Author

After leaving West Point, Poe eventually moved to Baltimore, where he lived with his impoverished Aunt Maria Poe Clemm, and her young daughter, Virginia. Poe continued to write poetry and prose. In 1833, he won a $50 prize and attention for his short story “Ms. Found in a Bottle.” The attention he gained led to a job offer as an editor for the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond. Poe accepted the position and moved to Richmond in 1835. His aunt and cousin joined him the following year. Poe married his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia, shortly afterwards.

The Poes and Mrs. Clemm moved to New York City in 1837 with the hope of Edgar finding work in the literary field. The financial "Panic of '37" had caused a depression in the city as well as the rest of the nation. Unable to find work, Poe moved to Philadelphia in 1838. The six years he spent in Philadelphia proved to be his most productive and perhaps the happiest years of his life. He worked as an editor and critic for one of the nation's largest magazines, Graham’s Magazine. Some of his most famous stories were written in Philadelphia, including “Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mask of the Red Death,” and “Ligeia.” Poe referred to South Carolina settings in several short stories, including “The Balloon-Hoax" and “The Oblong Box." The Gold Bug, first published in 1843, was by far his most well-known work and drew inspiration from Sullivan's Island. In 1842, his beloved wife became ill with tuberculosis. Her illness and the constant strain of financial problems caused Poe to sink into deep bouts of depression.

Professional and Personal Loss

The Poes and Mrs. Clemm moved to New York City in 1844. Poe continued to work as an editor and critic. He gained his greatest fame as a poet after his poem “The Raven” was published in 1845. In the same year, he achieved his lifelong dream of owning a literary journal. Unfortunately, the journal failed within a few months. The Poes and Mrs. Clemm moved outside of New York City to a small cottage in 1846. Virginia died of tuberculosis the following year.

Death

For the next two years, Poe continued to write poetry, short stories, criticism, and plans for his own literary journal. After a successful lecture tour in the South and an extended visit to Richmond, Poe seemed to be finally recovering from the loss of Virginia and making plans for the future. On his way back to New York City, Poe stopped in Baltimore, where he died of “acute congestion of the brain.” The day was October 7, 1849; Edgar Allan Poe was 40 years old.

Edgar Allan Poe was suspected of killing Mary Rogers, a young woman who worked in a cigar shop in New York and whose body was found in the Hudson River in 1841. Poe wrote a story based on her murder, called “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt”, in which he claimed to have solved the case using his fictional detective, C. Auguste Dupin. However, Poe’s solution was wrong, as the real killer confessed on his deathbed in 1849, shortly before Poe’s own death. The killer was William W. Gantt, a former Baltimore police officer and a journalist who had a romantic relationship with Rogers.

Possible Solutions