The Strange Life—and Stranger Death—of Edgar Allan Poe

Portrait of Edgar Allan Poe by Matthew Brady Studio. Photo: CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images/Corbis Historical

For a man who was posthumously convicted as a deranged, drug-using madman, Edgar Allan Poe may have enjoyed the controversy that arose during the production of Mike Flanagan's new Netflix adaptation of his legendary short story «The Fall of the House of Usher.» This led to difficulties because Frank Langella, who originally played the lead role of Usher patriarch Roderick in the modern retelling, was fired from the show due to «inappropriate behavior»; This was reportedly due to the actor telling lewd jokes and making lewd remarks on set. Trade publication Deadline said: «When Langella was fired, there was deep relief bordering on jubilation among the cast and crew.»

It's tempting to wonder what Poe's own reaction would have been to the respected actor's firing, which Langella called «the very definition of unacceptable behavior.» The author of countless poems, short stories, essays and even an unsuccessful play in his short life, he was one of America's most prolific writers, achieving fame (if not fortune) with his 1845 poem «The Raven» and devoting himself to literature with a dedication that put virtually all of him to shame contemporaries and fans.

However, after his mysterious death in 1849, at the age of 40, Poe's reputation suffered, not least because his friend turned enemy Rufus Wilmot Griswold published a posthumous memoir of him, which portrayed him as equally debauched and evil. as are the characters he wrote. o: a character assassination that continues to color perceptions of Poe's life a century and three-quarters after his untimely death.

However, after his mysterious death in 1849, at the age of 40, Poe's reputation suffered, not least because his friend-turned-enemy Rufus Wilmot Griswold published a posthumous memoir of him that inaccurately damned him as a madman : a pattern of personality assassination that continued to color the perception of Poe's life a century and three-quarters after his premature end.

As a young man, Poe wanted to pursue a literary career, but a constant lack of money prevented him from doing so. is an all-too-familiar complaint—even though he was unofficially adopted by a wealthy merchant named John Allan, who gave Poe his middle name after his mother died when Poe was a baby and his father abandoned him.

He enlisted in the army as a private in 1827 at the age of 18, using the pseudonym Edgar A. Perry, and lied about his age, even though he used the relative stability of army pay to publish his first collection of poetry, Tamerlane and Other Poems. . , which was simply attributed to the “Bostonian”. Only 50 copies were published, and they remain extremely valuable, with the last copy sold at auction in 2009 reaching $662,500.

He himself was later transferred to West Point, the United States Military Academy, and although he remained there for only a few months, author Louis Bayard was inspired enough by his time as a cadet to include him as a quasi-detective. a character in his 2006 historical detective novel The Pale Blue Eye, which was later adapted into a 2022 film starring former Harry Potter actor Harry Melling as the young Poe.

Vincent Price in the 1964 film “The Masque of the Red Death” Photo: Alamy

However, army life was not for the would-be author, and so after he was (deliberately) court-martialed for gross dereliction of duty in early 1831 and expelled from West Point, he began an unstable and difficult life as a writer. worked as an editor for various small-circulation magazines and at the same time tried to publish stories and poems.

Although Poe won a $50 prize for one story, 1833's «MS Found in a Bottle,» a tale of a doomed sailor that mixed horror and dark humor and was later praised by none other than Joseph Conrad as «almost as beautiful , like everything else.» of this kind may be — so faithful in detail that it could have been told by a dark and poetic genius, the inventor of the fantastic,” it did not lead to the breakthrough success he had hoped for. His marriage to his then 13-year-old cousin Virginia Clemm in 1835 (Poe was then 26) only strengthened his reputation as a man who was willing to look beyond the normal boundaries of society and look within to its more respectable citizens. with contempt.

It was perhaps as a result of this attitude that Poe now began to gain a reputation as a caustic literary critic or, as the time put it, «the tomahawk man.» Like many young writers rushing to establish a reputation, he attacked more famous figures such as the respected Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, accusing him of the “heresy of didactics.”

Carla Gugino in The Fall of the House of Usher Photo: Eike Schroter/Netflix

Poe was not afraid to make enemies, and the clearest example of this occurred when he attacked Griswold's anthology, The Poets and Poetry of America — which included himself — for being derivative and unadventurous; in a conversation with a friend, he called it «an outrageous deception.» The neglect was remembered, caused discontent and eventually returned with interest.

And yet Poe was now beginning to establish himself as a truly original, even brilliant, writer. His short story «The Fall of the House of Usher» was first published in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in 1839 and was subsequently hailed as a masterpiece of Gothic horror for its depiction of a doomed, immoral family living in a decaying mansion and surrounded by egos. horrors perpetuated; Along with many similar stories, it was included in the 1840 collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, which is now recognized as a classic but was largely ignored upon publication. Poe was offered no royalty or advance, only a small number of free copies.

If he felt slighted, it did not affect his prolific and increasingly innovative work. He created the modern detective story with his 1841 story «The Murders in the Rue Morgue», which was the first introduction of the character C. Auguste Dupin, who used what Poe called «reasoning» to penetrate the minds of criminals and thus solve the mystery.< /p>Bruce Greenwood as Roderick Usher in the new Netflix series. Photo: Eike Schroter/Netflix

However, the solution to this particular mystery — that the eponymous murders were committed by an angry orangutan — has since often been described as unconvincing and preposterous. suggesting that he may have been ahead of the curve, but it would have taken people like Conan Doyle, who was clearly influenced by Poe, to perfect what he started.

His first real success was the 1845 film The Raven, which used Poe's favorite theme: a man tormented by the loss of a beautiful woman and then beset by the appearance of a mysterious talking bird that repeats the word «never again» and eventually drives the protagonist to madness. . Poe was heavily influenced by the Romantic poets, including Byron and Keats, but this Gothic poem was entirely in his own voice; this brought him enormous fame and even gave him the nickname «Raven». However, the gloomy writer was still poor and complained: “I haven’t made any money. I am as poor now as I have ever been in life, except for hope, which by no means brings money.”

His wife Virginia died in 1847, and Poe spent the last two years of his life depressed, alternately drinking and trying to pursue a literary career. After several episodes of declining health, he headed to New York on September 27, 1849, trying to find work as a magazine editor and remarry, and was not seen or heard from again until October 3, when he was found. in someone else's torn clothes in a Baltimore tavern, in, as they say, “a state of brutal intoxication,” he spoke incoherently and in a state of delirium. He was transported to a hospital in Washington, but he never recovered and died on October 7, creating the final mystery of his life that persists to this day.

Edgar Allan Poe's grave in Baltimore, Maryland. Photo: Getty

Thanks in part to Griswold's posthumous murder, Poe was believed to be either insanely drunk or under the influence of drugs when he was found in Baltimore, and this was considered consistent with his unconventional public image. Since then, debate has raged about the likely causes of Poe's death, given that subsequent DNA tests showed that it was extremely unlikely that he had consumed alcohol, and it was suggested that he could have suffered from anything from rabies contracted from the family. a pet can become infected with cholera.

However, most modern biographers believe that it is likely that Poe was the victim of a scam known as «collaboration», in which people were pulled off the street and forced to vote repeatedly for political candidates, often subjecting them to a mixture of beatings and the forcible administration of pure alcohol and drugs, as well as camouflaged; this could explain both the unfamiliar clothes he was wearing and his confused and incoherent demeanor.

However, there has never been a truly satisfactory explanation of what happened to Poe and what led to his death, and it remains a tantalizing literary and historical mystery. The 2012 film The Raven, starring John Cusack as Poe, attempts to suggest that the author died of poisoning at the hands of a crazed serial killer who imprisoned Poe's lover in a scenario inspired by his short story «The Tell-Tale Heart» and forced the author to drink a mysterious substance as a reward for telling him where she was.

It's an ingenious (if unlikely) explanation for the writer's demise, but the film was derided by critics and a commercial failure. In a more respected novel, Matthew Pearl's 2006 book The Shadow of Poe, the writer's death set the stage for a tale of international conspiracy and the emergence of the alleged real-life mastermind for Poe's detective, Auguste Dupin.

Poe has remained a darling of film adaptations since his death, and the author himself is a popular figure for dramatization, appearing in countless novels, films and even episodes of South Park; there is even actor Edgar Allan Poe IV, who claims to be a descendant of the writer and played his supposed great-great-grandfather several times. Flanagan's version of The Fall of the House of Usher is Poe's most high-profile production in recent memory.

But it seems doubtful that this will confirm Alfred Hitchcock's admiring remarks about the author. “It was because I liked Edgar Allan Poe’s stories so much that I started making suspense films,” the director said. “Without wishing to appear immodest, I cannot help but compare what I try to put into my films with what Poe puts into his stories; an absolutely incredible story, told to readers with such hallucinatory logic that it seems that the same story could happen to you tomorrow.”