Edgar Allen Poe, Father of Modern Horror… Detective, Science Fiction, and Treasure Hunt Stories?!?!

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. And to search for the Our American Stories podcast, go to the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Edgar Allan Poe is known for his scary short stories and poems, and when we look at his life, early tragedies explain a lot. But what we don’t often think of when we consider Poe, or his comedic writings, his detective stories, and even a bit of early science fiction. Here to pull back the curtain on Poe is Chris Simpner, curator at the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia. Take it away.

Chris Poe was born in 1809, the same year as Abraham Lincoln, but he was born up in Boston. His parents are traveling actors, so his mother was from England. She’d come here to the States as a little girl, and she’d been acting on stages up and down the East Coast. You usually traveled up and down the coast with the theatrical seasons, always try to say one step ahead the next yellow fever outbreak. I mean, she had a pretty rough. She lost her mother to yellow fever in South Carolina, her stepfather yellow fever in North Carolina, then her first husband yellow fever in Virginia, all by the time she was eighteen. Then she remarried at age eighteen to David Poe Jr., who was Edgar’s father, and he appears to run out in the family. Left Poe’s mother to fend for herself and three kids. And when she was dying here in Richmond, some local ladies heard, “The famous actress Mrs. Poe is in ill health, she’s out of resources,” and they started bringing her meals. Even though a society lady we wouldn’t even associate with an actress, they were bring her meals and caring for. One of those ladies was Frances Valentine Allan, and she agreed to take in little Eddie, so she and her husband christened him Edgar Allan. Poe and his sister and brother went to live with different families. You don’t hear a lot about his brother. He died when he was just twenty-four. His sister stayed here in Richmond, and she became a school teacher. She taught art and penmanship. So Poe grew up here in Richmond and went to local schools. When he was six years old, the Allans went to England and Scotland, so he got to see Europe for a little while. He got to go to a good boarding school over there in London, came back here and was just enchanted by the landscape around here, the river, and that same river that’s just a few blocks from where we’re sitting now. Poe practically grew up in that river. He describes how he sailed out to the little islands or swam. He’d been with the best swimmers ever in that river, so they he holds a record for swimming six miles against the tide in the James River. Still hadn’t been. We had a guy come out here a few years ago, the swim fins and everything, saying, “I’m gonna beat Poe’s record,” and we never heard from him again. He’s maybe still down there. But Poe also developed love for poetry. His foster father never really warmed up to him, never legally adopted him, but he was an importer-exporter. He imported a lot of the Ladies’ British magazine, so Poe got a chance to read the latest British romantic poet, and he thought that this guy, Lord Byron, the guy they called “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” is pretty much the greatest thing ever, the rock star of his day. Dressed in black, Byron had swum the Hellespont. That’s part of the reason why Poe swam so much in the James River. He’s trying to be like Byron. But while Poe was here, he also first fell in love. He met a girl called Jane Stannard. He called the first purely ideal love of my soul, and his poem “To Helen” is dedicated to her. He thought she was Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman who ever lived. The problem was: he was fourteen. She was his best friend’s mother, so would have really worked out a poet’s like unrequited love. They like to worship somebody from afar, so he showed her his poetry. She gave him motherly advice and encouragement. She probably thought he was a nice, weird kid. But then shortly after they met, she went insane and died, and that left a lasting impression on Poe. When he was growing up, his mother died when he was two. His first love here dies when he was fifteen. Then his foster mother died when he was twenty, so over and over again, when he really became attached to someone, they ended up dying early. And then he got married, and his wife got sick, and she died when she was just twenty-four years old. So he always had that sense the beauty was mingled with loss. And when he was about fifteen, he met another girl. Her name was Elmira Royster. She came from a pretty wealthy family. Her father was a merchant, and there was no way her father wanted her messing around with this punk kid, this actress’s son who’d never been legally adopted, wasn’t going to inherit anything. So Edgar Omaier had to sneak ways little garden up on Franklin Street just to see each other, and they made this pact, “I’m going to go to college and make a name for myself, get education.” I think Poe probably thought he was going to become a professor, you know, because you couldn’t make a living off your poetry. That would just be crazy. He was going to make a living from his professorship and write poetry in his free time, sort of the Longfellow game plan. You know, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the professor at Harvard, married a wealthy woman, and then he got to write poetry in his free time. And while he was out there, Poe excelled at languages. He studied ancient to modern languages. Jefferson had this plan that students could pick their own curriculum. So he decided, “I’m going to study that.” Back here, Mr. Allan, the importer-exporter, he thought, “Why are you wasting your time learning that? You need to learn skills or to help you take over my import-export business.” So Poe was there no money, Allan wouldn’t pay. He had no money, so he had this bright idea, “Why don’t I gamble to raise my tuition money?” And then he got himself about $2,000 in debt. After the first nine months, he couldn’t stay there, dropped out of college, came back here and found out Elmira had dumped him. She’d done him wrong. So he decided, “Well, no more, Elmira. I can’t go back to UVA. I’m going to go out and find adventures.” So he stowed away aboard a coal ship. He was eighteen years old and just ran away from home. Poe still didn’t know the full story, though she still loved him. Apparently he’d been sending her letters from college. As soon as he got to her house, her father destroyed them. Her father did not want her to know that Poe had been writing her. Her father convinced her that Poe had forgotten about her. Maybe he’d met somebody better at college (even though, you know, it was all boys back then). So she thought she’d been forgotten. She accepted proposal from somebody else, and that’s who she married.

And you’ve been listening to Chris Simpner talk about the early life of Edgar Allan Poe, and, my goodness, all he knew was loss. Beauty and love were always mingled with loss with young Edgar. When we come back, more of the story, the life of Edgar Allan Poe, here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here, and I’m inviting you to help Our American Stories celebrate this country’s 250th birthday coming soon. If you want to help inspire countless others to love America like we do, and want to help us bring the inspiring and important stories told here about a good and beautiful country, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to Our American Stories. Go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Any amount helps. Go to OurAmericanStories.com and give. And we’re back with Our American Stories and the story of Edgar Allan Poe. Chris Simpner, curator at the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia, was just telling us about the unfortunate losses Poe experienced as a boy. Now his childhood sweetheart, Elmira, married another man. As a result, Poe decided to strike out on his own. Let’s return to Chris.

So he decided he was going to see the world, have all sorts of ventures. He enlisted the U.S. Army up in Boston. They sent him down to Fort Moultrie in South Carolina, eventually up here at Fort Monroe in Virginia, and in two years made it for a private so sergeant major. He did an outstanding job. Different jobs during the time. He was a clerk for while he was artificer, mixed gunpowder and explosives, really technical, demanding job. We know he was good at it because he didn’t blow off an arm or leg doing it, because a lot of this was really experimental back then, making sure that if you had the right amount of powder that the projectile would arc at just the right point and jedgo just right of back velocity. So Poe did so well. He said, “You know what? I could make a living in the military. I could become an officer.” And he was really chummy with his officers, and they got him letters recommendations. Also, back here in Richmond, the Allans were friends with General Winfield Scott. And this is a guy who was in the War of 1812, the Seminole Wars, Mexican-American War. He was even later an advisor to Lincoln during the Civil War. So this is somebody that he’s got some influence. And he helped Poe get into the United States Military Academy at West Point, and they checked the records, and for ten years before that and ten years after that, nobody else was on record for having gone from enlisted man to a cadet at West Point. Who also heard while he was in the military, his foster mother, Frances Allan, was sick, and she said the last thing she wanted to see before she died was her “little Eddy,” and he made it back here a day late for her funeral, and he was just heartbroken over that. And that’s when he decided, “You’ll, I’m going to make something myself for Frances Allan’s sake.” And Allan helped him get out of his enlistment. Because he still has enlistment, he still has to serve that. So what you could do back then, if you had the money, was hire somebody to take your place and serve out the rest of your enlistment for it. And you could get somebody for $25. But Poe was desperate, so he also this guy, Bully Grave, $75, a big chunk of change, to take his place, but never paid him. And Allan had the money. Allan’s worth about three corps million dollars, so this guy’s Bill Gates, but he didn’t want to pay for it. Poe at one point got a letter from Bully asking, “Well, where’s my money?” “I’m I’m serving at your enlistment for you. Where’s my money?” And Poe wrote back, “Well, Allan has it, so ask him.” So he wrote Allan, “Allan, actually, I’m not paying you.” So Bully wrote Poe again while Poe was at West Point and says, “Allan says he’s done anything about. It’s a Poe write speck.” “You know, Allan, he’s not sober very often. He probably just got drunk and forgot about the whole thing. So you need probably to be reminded.” And that letter we found in Allan’s file, so apparently Bully showed that to Allan. Allan says, “Oh, yeah, your son’s talking smack about you.” He says, “You’re drunk.” And about that time, Allan cut Poe off for good, and Poe decided. West Point was not the place for him. He hated it there. He was racking up demerits left and right. But the cadets loved him. They thought he was a funny guy, the great sense of humor, a practical joker, and they all chipped in, about over 125 cadets chipped in to help him publish a book of poetry, thinking it’s gonna be funny poetry making fun of all the command officers. Instead, the book came out, and it’s a bunch of sad poetry about death and warning and despair. And they threw most of the copies into the Hudson River, just get rid of them. Even our copy has obscenities scrawled on the front page about how much that cadet hated it. He was ripped off the book as a cheat. They probably would have given Poe good beating, except he’d already been expelled. He wasn’t there anymore by the time the book came out, so that book didn’t really make a lot of waves. But some of the poems in it now, we look back and say, “Oh, yeah, that’s ‘Lenore,’ that’s ‘The Sleeper.'” These are some of his major poems. He was already publishing here at the age of twenty-two. He’s already off to good start by the age of twenty-two. This is his third book of poetry, and he’s got a lot of his classic poems, about half the poems he’d ever write. He got the hint now that, you know, poetry really wasn’t going to pay the bills. But he saw that magazines were popping up everywhere, so he said, “What a magazines want?” And he remembered growing up with Mr. Allan reading the latest British magazines that Allan was importing, and they wanted scary, weird, mysterious stories. So Poe put together a bunch of bizarre stories, and he heard there was a contest coming up: $100 for the best story, a huge chunk of change, years’ rent, for the best story. He submitted a whole pack of stories, and none of them won, but the magazine printed them anyway. So his works got in print, but he didn’t get paid for him. So that’s the problem. He’s always struggling to get paid from unscrupulous magazine editors and publishers. But he kept submitting more short stories, getting his works published. Finally won a literary contest for the story “Manuscript Found in the Bottle,” and that made him the right connections where he could get a job back here in Richmond. His foster father died the previous year. They’d never reconciled. Poe wanted to reconcile, wanted to see him one last time. And last thing he ever saw him was he had to force his way into the house past Allan’s second wife, and Allan just shook his cane at him, said, “Get out! I never want to see you again. I don’t want to talk to you.” So Poe left without ever rebuilding that bond. But now had new bonds. He’d really become very attached to his Aunt Mariah and her daughter Virginia. And there was another cousin who was going to take in Virginia, but it looks like he wasn’t going to take in the mother too. So Edgar wanted both these women. He wanted them to be near him, so he moved them down to Richmond with him, and he married his cousin, which wasn’t usual back then. They also married a lot younger back then. These two women just supported him through everything. And this guy, he really had to struggle. At “The Messenger,” he’s making a decent living, which was not too much today, today, the equivalent of $17,000 a year. So you may get by if you’re single, but not with the family. You got to take care of and the wife. You got to get tutors for her and a piano instructor. And no matter how poor he was, he made sure she had a piano play because he loved to hear his wife play the piano and sing, and Edgar would sing along and play his flute. When Poe got the job with “The Southern Literary Messenger,” he’s twenty-six years old, he’s kind of a nobody here. But the magazine’s not really going anywhere. The circulation about 500 copies a month. Nobody’s buying it. The idea was that all the big cities up north—you know, they’re powerful, they’re educated, they’re influential; they have the big magazines, all the writers live up north—and the South needs a writer. So he started out by sending in a story called “Berenice,” and he very specifically was told, “You know, we need to write stories that would educate and entertain the public without offending them.” And “Berenice” is a love story about and a man named Egaeus who falls in love with his young cousin, Berenice. And this Egaeus explains to you that sometimes he has a one-track mind. He can see a spot on the edge of a piece of paper and stare it for so long he goes into self-induced trance thinking about that little spot. So one day he sees Berenice smile and can think of nothing else but her luscious, pearly white teeth. Becomes fascinated, obsessed with those teeth. But then she gets sick and she wasted away, and she’s buried. So he goes back to his chamber, and he fantasizes, he dreams of her teeth until he puts himself into a tooth trance, until he’s snapped out of it by a servant banging the door, says, “Wake up! Snap out of it! Your wife wasn’t really dead. We accidentally buried her alive!” We heard her screaming the cemetery, rushed out to rescue there. By the time we got there, somebody else had already dug her up, and she didn’t have any teeth. It was a pretty gruesome story. You getn’t anger reviews, rather, magazines saying, “You can’t publish this. This is injurious to the public’s morals. You should ban this sort of thing.” But Poe almost got fired here, but he told his boss, “Trust me, this is what’s gonna sell. You’re gonna see if this is successful or not based on the circulation of the magazine. This is what people want.” And he’s right. You know, in a year’s time, their circulation increased seven times as most popular journal in the South. He had a national reputation.