Edgar Allan Poe

1809–1849

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston to two travelling actors. His father left and his mother died before he was three, and he was taken in by a merchant in Richmond, Virginia, John Allan, who never adopted him. They quarrelled bitterly, and Poe was left without money or help.

He lived by writing and editing for magazines, and was always poor. His poem The Raven made him famous in 1845; his tales of terror and his stories of the detective Dupin, the first of their kind, were read far more after his death. He died in Baltimore in 1849, at forty, after being found delirious in the street.

Edgar Allan Poe on the site

The Tell-Tale HeartPublished in 1843 About 10 min read "True! nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?" The narrator loves the old man he lives with, but cannot bear his pale blue eye, and night after night he opens the old man's door in the dark. He means to prove how calm and clever he is by telling you exactly what he did, and why he could not stop hearing it. Edgar Allan Poe's very short horror story came out in 1843. The Cask of AmontilladoPublished in 1846 About 10 min read Montresor has borne a thousand injuries from Fortunato, and when Fortunato insults him he swears revenge. He finds him drunk at the carnival, dressed as a jester, and tempts him with a rare cask of Amontillado sherry waiting in the family vaults. Down they go together through the damp catacombs, among the bones of the dead. Edgar Allan Poe's short tale of revenge was first published in 1846, and it is told by the murderer himself, fifty years later.

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