The Death of Edgar Allan Poe

On October 3 1849, the famed American horror and mystery author Edgar Allan Poe was found in a complete state of delirium – incoherent, dishevelled and wearing a stranger’s clothes. Four days later, he died in a hospital. His final words were “Lord, help my poor soul”.

The nature of Poe’s untimely demise at the age of 40 remains a mystery today, having baffled scholars for over 170 years. Dozens of possible causes of death have been suggested — from rabies to syphilis. Some suggest Poe was victimised in a form of voter fraud known as a cooping scheme, in which gangs working for corrupt politicians would sometimes beat unwilling bystanders to make them vote repeatedly for a certain candidate.

Others have suggested suicide. Poe’s contemporary, Charles Baudelaire — a French poet who also translated Poe’s works — suggested that the incident was “almost a suicide, a suicide prepared for a long time”.

At first, the suicide hypothesis may seem a touch dramatic. The idea of an author whose works were famously dark and gruesome being so disturbed as to take his own life almost sounds like a bad cliché. However, there may be something to this theory.

Poe’s personal life was a complex blend of factors that are reliably associated with an above-average risk for depression and death by suicide. He was male, often felt overwhelming hopelessness, had a history of alcohol and substance abuse, and repeatedly lost loved ones. Critically, Poe had made previous suicide attempts — having tried to overdose on laudanum a year before his death.

All possible causes of Poe’s death have, to date, been purely speculative. He received no autopsy, and no medical records of the event have survived (if they ever existed). Yet even in the absence of medical data, we are now able to examine Poe’s life and death through an objective lens.

Today, we have tools that can measure a person’s psychology from the words they use in everyday life. My colleagues and I have used text-analytic methods to better understand everything from the emotional underpinnings of political ideology to entrepreneurial personality profiles to the psychological effects of childhood sexual abuse.

Language and depression

The links between language, depression and suicidal behaviour are well established. Researchers consistently find that depressed people use language differently than their non-depressed peers.

People who are depressed tend to use more negative language. They also use language consistent with social withdrawal, including more self-referential words (“me” words) and fewer collective pronouns (“we” words). Depressed people also typically use more “working through” language – also called “cognitive processing” words – which includes “think”, “suppose” and “understand”.

Research has found that people who died by suicide can be identified by such language patterns. For example, they consistently use more “me” words and fewer “we” words. Importantly, these patterns tend to increase drastically as they get closer to suicide. Analyses of the language patterns in Marilyn Monroe’s Fragments and the diaries of explorer Henry Hellyer have been used to support the case for each of their suicides.

Building on this past research, our research team created an index of depression language. We then used it to assess whether Poe’s language showed signs of recurrent depression or feelings of suicide. We analysed over 400 stories, poems and personal letters written by Poe throughout his life. Accounting for his own unique linguistic patterns, we identified any prolonged spikes that signalled likely periods of major depression:

Throughout Poe’s life, nearly 20 texts scored abnormally high on our depression index, half of which were written in 1843, 1845 and 1849 — the year of his death. Poe’s depression scores were most pronounced in his personal letters, which are often the best reflection of one’s “authentic self”. They are largely absent from his professional writings. Notable exceptions include The Light-House, which scored extremely high on our depression index and was still a work in progress at the time of his death.

Looking deeper, we explored the events of Poe’s life during his most depressed periods. Surprisingly, 1843 and 1845 were two of his most successful years. Poe earned overnight fame for The Gold-Bug (1843) and The Raven (1845). Both were reprinted dozens of times to keep up with popular demand. Yet Poe’s relationship with his newfound fame was complicated. He earned practically nothing from his accomplishments. He deeply resented his own poverty, and fame likely betrayed his expectations.

Was it suicide?

From our analyses, we can conclude that Poe’s final months were indeed quite dark. This was primarily evident within his personal life. For example, Poe’s personal letter that scored highest on our depression index was one written to his mother-in-law in July 1849, where he wrote about the poor state of his health, finances and clothes.

Although our analyses reveal that Poe was spiralling into a depression at the end of his life, we can’t say for sure whether his death was a suicide. Considering his rather high suicide risk from a clinical perspective, paired with our objective analysis of his mental states, it remains a real possibility that he did kill himself. Following our analyses, the suicide hypothesis currently stands as the only cause of death that has objective evidence behind it.

We cannot definitively rule out other theories of Poe’s death. Given the less consistent results from his professional writings, and that suicide is often influenced by numerous factors simultaneously, a more complex picture emerges. At the very least, his mounting depression could have played some role in his judgement and decision-making leading up to his death. Ultimately, the nature of Poe’s death remains a mystery quite befitting the master of the macabre.

Depression and language: analysing Edgar Allan Poe’s writings to solve the mystery of his death. By Ryan Boyd. The Conversation ,  February  24, 2020.

It was raining in Baltimore on October 3, 1849, but that didn't stop Joseph W. Walker, a compositor for the Baltimore Sun, from heading out to Gunner's Hall, a public house bustling with activity. It was Election Day, and Gunner's Hall served as a pop-up polling location for the 4th Ward polls. When Walker arrived at Gunner's Hall, he found a man, delirious and dressed in shabby second-hand clothes, lying in the gutter. The man was semi-conscious, and unable to move, but as Walker approached the him, he discovered something unexpected: the man was Edgar Allan Poe. Worried about the health of the addled poet, Walker stopped and asked Poe if he had any acquaintances in Baltimore that might be able to help him. Poe gave Walker the name of Joseph E. Snodgrass, a magazine editor with some medical training. Immediately, Walker penned Snodgrass a letter asking for help.

Baltimore City, Oct. 3, 1849

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, & he says he is acquainted with you, he is in need of immediate assistance.

Yours, in haste,

JOS. W. WALKER

To Dr. J.E. Snodgrass.

On September 27—almost a week earlier—Poe had left Richmond, Virginia bound for Philadelphia to edit a collection of poems for Mrs. St. Leon Loud, a minor figure in American poetry at the time. When Walker found Poe in delirious disarray outside of the polling place, it was the first anyone had heard or seen of the poet since his departure from Richmond. Poe never made it to Philadelphia to attend to his editing business. Nor did he ever make it back to New York, where he had been living, to escort his aunt back to Richmond for his impending wedding. Poe was never to leave Baltimore, where he launched his career in the early 19th- century, again—and in the four days between Walker finding Poe outside the public house and Poe's death on October 7, he never regained enough consciousness to explain how he had come to be found, in soiled clothes not his own, incoherent on the streets. Instead, Poe spent his final days wavering between fits of delirium, gripped by visual hallucinations. The night before his death, according to his attending physician Dr. John J. Moran, Poe repeatedly called out for "Reynolds"—a figure who, to this day, remains a mystery.

Poe's death—shrouded in mystery—seems ripped directly from the pages of one of his own works. He had spent years crafting a careful image of a man inspired by adventure and fascinated with enigmas—a poet, a detective, an author, a world traveler who fought in the Greek War of Independence and was held prisoner in Russia. But though his death certificate listed the cause of death as phrenitis, or swelling of the brain, the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death have led many to speculate about the true cause of Poe's demise. "Maybe it’s fitting that since he invented the detective story," says Chris Semtner, curator of the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia, "he left us with a real-life mystery."

1. Beating

In 1867, one of the first theories to deviate from either phrenitis or alcohol was published by biographer E. Oakes Smith in her article "Autobiographic Notes: Edgar Allan Poe." "At the instigation of a woman, " Smith writes, "who considered herself injured by him, he was cruelly beaten, blow upon blow, by a ruffian who knew of no better mode of avenging supposed injuries. It is well known that a brain fever followed. . . ." Other accounts also mention "ruffians" who had beaten Poe senseless before his death. As Eugene Didier wrote in his 1872 article, "The Grave of Poe," that while in Baltimore, Poe ran into some friends from West Point, who prevailed upon him to join them for drinks. Poe, unable to handle liquor, became madly drunk after a single glass of champagne, after which he left his friends to wander the streets. In his drunken state, he "was robbed and beaten by ruffians, and left insensible in the street all night."

2. Cooping

Others believe that Poe fell victim to a practice known as cooping, a method of voter fraud practiced by gangs in the 19th century where an unsuspecting victim would be kidnapped, disguised and forced to vote for a specific candidate multiple times under multiple disguised identities. Voter fraud was extremely common in Baltimore around the mid 1800s, and the polling site where Walker found the disheveled Poe was a known place that coopers brought their victims. The fact that Poe was found delirious on election day, then, is no coincidence.

Over the years, the cooping theory has come to be one of the more widely accepted explanations for Poe's strange demeanor before his death. Before Prohibition, voters were given alcohol after voting as a sort of reward; had Poe been forced to vote multiple times in a cooping scheme, that might explain his semi-conscious, ragged state.

Around the late 1870s, Poe's biographer J.H. Ingram received several letters that blamed Poe's death on a cooping scheme. A letter from William Hand Browne, a member of the faculty at Johns Hopkins, explains that "the general belief here is, that Poe was seized by one of these gangs, (his death happening just at election-time; an election for sheriff took place on Oct. 4th), 'cooped,' stupefied with liquor, dragged out and voted, and then turned adrift to die."

3. Alcohol

"A lot of the ideas that have come up over the years have centered around the fact that Poe couldn’t handle alcohol," says Semtner. "It has been documented that after a glass of wine he was staggering drunk. His sister had the same problem; it seems to be something hereditary."

Months before his death, Poe became a vocal member of the temperance movement, eschewing alcohol, which he'd struggled with all his life. Biographer Susan Archer Talley Weiss recalls, in her biography "The Last Days of Edgar A. Poe," an event, toward the end of Poe's time in Richmond, that might be relevant to theorists that prefer a "death by drinking" demise for Poe. Poe had fallen ill in Richmond, and after making a somewhat miraculous recovery, was told by his attending physician that "another such attack would prove fatal." According to Weiss, Poe replied that "if people would not tempt him, he would not fall," suggesting that the first illness was brought on by a bout of drinking.

Those around Poe during his finals days seem convinced that the author did, indeed, fall into that temptation, drinking himself to death. As his close friend J. P. Kennedy wrote on October 10, 1849: "On Tuesday last Edgar A. Poe died in town here at the hospital from the effects of a debauch. . . . He fell in with some companion here who seduced him to the bottle, which it was said he had renounced some time ago. The consequence was fever, delirium, and madness, and in a few days a termination of his sad career in the hospital. Poor Poe! . . . A bright but unsteady light has been awfully quenched."

Though the theory that Poe's drinking lead to his death fails to explain his five-day disappearance, or his second-hand clothes on October 3, it was nonetheless a popular theory propagated by Snodgrass after Poe's death. Snodgrass, a member of the temperance movement, gave lectures across the country, blaming Poe's death on binge drinking. Modern science, however, has thrown a wrench into Snodgrasses talking points: samples of Poe's hair from after his death show low levels of lead, explains Semtner, which is an indication that Poe remained faithful to his vow of sobriety up until his demise.

4. Carbon Monoxide Poisoning

In 1999, public health researcher Albert Donnay argued that Poe's death was a result of carbon monoxide poisoning from coal gas that was used for indoor lighting during the 19th century. Donnay took clippings of Poe's hair and tested them for certain heavy metals that would be able to reveal the presence of coal gas. The test was inconclusive, leading biographers and historians to largely discredit Donnay's theory.

5. Heavy Metal Poisoning

While Donnay's test didn't reveal levels of heavy metal consistent with carbon monoxide poisoning, the tests did reveal elevated levels of mercury in Poe's system months before his death. According to Semtner, Poe's mercury levels were most likely elevated as a result of a cholera epidemic he'd been exposed to in July of 1849, while in Philadelphia. Poe's doctor prescribed calomel, or mercury chloride. Mercury poisoning, Semtner says, could help explain some of Poe's hallucinations and delirium before his death. However, the levels of mercury found in Poe's hair, even at their highest, are still 30 times below the level consistent with mercury poisoning.

6. Rabies

In 1996, Dr. R. Michael Benitez was participating in a clinical pathologic conference where doctors are given patients, along with a list of symptoms, and instructed to diagnose and compare with other doctors as well as the written record. The symptoms of the anonymous patient E.P., "a writer from Richmond" were clear: E.P. had succumbed to rabies. According to E.P.'s supervising physician, Dr. J.J. Moran, E.P. had been admitted to a hospital due to "lethargy and confusion." Once admitted, E.P.'s condition began a rapid downward spiral: shortly, the patient was exhibiting delirium, visual hallucinations, wide variations in pulse rate and rapid, shallow breathing. Within four days—the median length of survival after the onset of serious rabies symptoms—E.P. was dead.

E.P., Benitez soon found out, wasn't just any author from Richmond. It was Poe whose death the Maryland cardiologist had diagnosed as a clear case of rabies, a fairly common virus in the 19th century. Running counter to any prevailing theories at the time, Benitez's diagnosis ran in the September 1996 issue of the Maryland Medical Journal. As Benitez pointed out in his article, without DNA evidence, it's impossible to say with 100 percent certainty that Poe succumbed to the rabies virus. There are a few kinks in the theory, including no evidence of hydrophobia (those afflicted with rabies develop a fear of water, Poe was reported to have been drinking water at the hospital until his death) nor any evidence of an animal bite (though some with rabies don't remember being bitten by an animal). Still, at the time of the article's publication, Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House Museum in Baltimore, agreed with Benitez's diagnosis. "This is the first time since Poe died that a medical person looked at Poe's death without any preconceived notions," Jerome told the Chicago Tribune in October of 1996. "If he knew it was Edgar Allan Poe, he'd think, 'Oh yeah, drugs, alcohol,' and that would influence his decision. Dr. Benitez had no agenda."

7. Brain Tumor

One of the most recent theories about Poe's death suggests that the author succumbed to a brain tumor, which influenced his behavior before his death. When Poe died, he was buried, rather unceremoniously, in an unmarked grave in a Baltimore graveyard. Twenty-six years later, a statue was erected, honoring Poe, near the graveyard's entrance. Poe's coffin was dug up, and his remains exhumed, in order to be moved to the new place of honor. But more than two decades of buried decay had not been kind to Poe's coffin—or the corpse within it—and the apparatus fell apart as workers tried to move it from one part of the graveyard to another. Little remained of Poe's body, but one worker did remark on a strange feature of Poe's skull: a mass rolling around inside. Newspapers of the day claimed that the clump was Poe's brain, shriveled yet intact after almost three decades in the ground.

We know, today, that the mass could not be Poe's brain, which is one of the first parts of the body to rot after death. But Matthew Pearl, an American author who wrote a novel about Poe's death, was nonetheless intrigued by this clump. He contacted a forensic pathologist, who told him that while the clump couldn't be a brain, it could be a brain tumor, which can calcify after death into hard masses.

According to Semtner, Pearl isn't the only person to believe Poe suffered from a brain tumor: a New York physician once told Poe that he had a lesion on his brain that caused his adverse reactions to alcohol.

8. Flu

A far less sinister theory suggests that Poe merely succumbed to the flu—which might have turned into deadly pneumonia—on this deathbed. As Semtner explains, in the days leading up to Poe's departure from Richmond, the author visited a physician, complaining of illness. "His last night in town, he was very sick, and his [soon-to-be] wife noted that he had a weak pulse, a fever, and she didn’t think he should take the journey to Philadelphia," says Semtner. "He visited a doctor, and the doctor also told him not to travel, that he was too sick." According to newspaper reports from the time, it was raining in Baltimore when Poe was there—which Semtner thinks could explain why Poe was found in clothes not his own. "The cold and the rain exasperated the flu he already had," says Semtner, "and maybe that eventually lead to pneumonia. The high fever might account for his hallucinations and his confusion."

9. Murder

In his 2000 book Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe, author John Evangelist Walsh presents yet another theory about Poe's death: that Poe was murdered by the brothers of his wealthy fiancée, Elmira Shelton. Using evidence from newspapers, letters and memoirs, Walsh argues that Poe actually made it to Philadelphia, where he was ambushed by Shelton's three brothers, who warned Poe against marrying their sister. Frightened by the experience, Poe disguised himself in new clothes (accounting for, in Walsh's mind, his second-hand clothing) and hid in Philadelphia for nearly a week, before heading back to Richmond to marry Shelton. Shelton's brothers intercepted Poe in Baltimore, Walsh postulates, beat him, and forced him to drink whiskey, which they knew would send Poe into a deathly sickness. Walsh's theory has gained little traction among Poe historians—or book reviewers; Edwin J. Barton, in a review for the journal American Literature, called Walsh's story "only plausible, not wholly persuasive." "Midnight Dreary is interesting and entertaining," he concluded, "but its value to literary scholars is limited and oblique."

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For Semtner, however, none of the theories fully explain Poe's curious end. "I've never been completely convinced of any one theory, and I believe Poe's cause of death resulted from a combination of factors," he says. "His attending physician is our best source of evidence. If he recorded on the mortality schedule that Poe died of phrenitis, Poe was most likely suffering from encephalitis or meningitis, either of which might explain his symptoms."

The (Still) Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe. By Natasha Geiling.  Smithsonian Magazine , October 7, 2014. 

Edgar Allan Poe once wrote an essay called “The Philosophy of Composition,” to explain why he wrote “The Raven” backwards. The poem tells the story of a man who, “once upon a midnight dreary,” while mourning his dead love, Lenore, answers a tapping at his chamber door, to find “Darkness there and nothing more.” He peers into the darkness, “dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before,” and meets a silence broken only by his own whispered word, “Lenore?” He closes the door. The tapping starts again. He flings open his shutter and in, “with many a flirt and flutter,” flies a raven, “grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore.”The bird speaks just one word: Nevermore. That word is the poem’s last, but it’s where Poe began. He started, he said, “at the end, where all works of art should begin,” and “first put pen to paper” at what became the third to last stanza:

“Prophet,” said I, “thing of evil! Prophet still if bird or devil!

By that heaven that bends above us—by that God we both adore,

Tell this soul with sorrow laden, if within the distant Aidenn,

It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore—

Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.”

                 Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

“The Philosophy of Composition” is a lovely little essay, but, as Poe himself admitted, it’s a bit of jiggery-pokery, too. Poe didn’t actually write “The Raven” backwards. The essay is as much an exercise as the poem itself, a contrivance, a flourish. Here is a beautiful poem; it does everything a poem should do, is everything a poem should be. And here is a clever essay about the writing of a beautiful poem. Top that. Nearly everything Poe wrote, including the spooky stories for which he’s most remembered, has this virtuosic, showy, lilting, and slightly wilting quality, like a peony just past bloom. Poe didn’t write “The Raven” to answer the exacting demands of a philosophic Art, or not entirely, anyway. He wrote it for the same reason he wrote tales like “The Gold-bug”: to stave off starvation. For a long while, Poe lived on bread and molasses; weeks before “The Gold-bug” was published, he was begging strangers on the street for fifty cents to buy something to eat. “‘The Raven’ has had a great ‘run,’” Poe wrote a friend,“but I wrote it for the express purpose of running—just as I did the ‘Gold-Bug,’ you know. The bird beat the bug, though, all hollow.” The public that swallowed that bird and bug, Poe quite strenuously resented.You either love Poe or you don’t but, either way, unless you happen to be, say, Coleridge, Poe doesn’t love you. A writer more condescending to more adoring readers is hard to think of. “The nose of a mob is its imagination,” Poe wrote, “By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.”

Poe died, under very mysterious circumstances, in October 1849. Drunk and delirious, he seems to have been dragged around Baltimore to cast votes, precinct after precinct, in one of that city’s infamously corrupt congressional elections, until he finally collapsed. From Ryan’s tavern, a polling place in the Fourth Ward, Poe was carried, like a corpse, to a hospital. He died three days later. He was forty years old.

“My whole existence has been the merest Romance,” Poe wrote, the year before his death,“in the sense of the most utter unworldliness.” This is Byronic bunk. Poe’s life was tragic, but he was about as unworldly as a bale of cotton. Poe’s world was Andrew Jackson’s America, a world of banking collapse, financial panic, and grinding depression that had a particularly devastating effect on the publishing industry, where Poe sought his perch. Poe’s biography really is a series of unfortunate events. But two of those events were global financial crises: the Panic of 1819 and the Panic of 1837, the pit and pendulum of the antebellum economy. Poe died at the end of a decade known as “the Hungry Forties,” and he wasn’t the only American to fall face down in the gutter during a seven-yearlong depression brought on by a credit collapse.9 He did not live out of time. He lived in hard times, dark times, up and down times. Indigence cast a shadow over everything Poe attempted. Poverty was his raven, tapping at the door, and it was Poe, not the bird, who uttered, helplessly, another rhyme for “Nevermore.” “I send you an original tale,” Poe once began a letter, and, at its end, added one line more: “P.S. I am poor.”

 Edgar Poe was born in Boston, on January 19, 1809, to a talented actress named Eliza Poe and her hapless husband, David, who deserted her. When Edgar was two, his mother died of consumption. The Poe orphans had little more to depend upon than the charity of strangers. The children were separated and Edgar landed in the home of a wealthy Richmond merchant named John Allan and his sickly, childless wife, Fanny. Allan, who ran a firm called the House of Ellis and Allan, never adopted the boy, and never loved him, either. Poe, for his part, took Allan’s name but never wanted it. (He signed letters, and published, as “Edgar A. Poe.”) In 1815, Allan moved his family to London, to take advantage of the booming British market for Virginia tobacco.11 Poe attended posh boarding schools. Then, during the Panic of 1819, the first bust in the industrializing nineteenth century, banks failed, factories closed, and Allan’s business imploded. The House of Ellis and Allan fell. Allan, plagued with two hundred thousand dollars of debt, sailed back to Virginia. Poe turned poet. The earliest verses in his hand that survive were written when he was fifteen. “Last night with many cares and toils oppress’d / Weary . . . I laid me on a couch to rest.” Adolescent melancholy, and nothing more. But those lines are scribbled on a sheet of paper on which Allan had calculated, just above Poe’s scrawl, the compound interest on a debt.

In 1823, Poe fell in love with Jane Stannard, the unhinged mother of a school friend. A year later, Stannard died, insane. Poe spent much time at her graveside. “No more” became his favorite phrase. (Poe would later insist that mourning the death of a beautiful woman is, of all sorrows, the most poetical; he loved to play with names.)14 In 1825, Allan inherited a fortune from an uncle. Allan rose; Poe kept falling. At sixteen, Poe went to the University of Virginia where he drank and gambled and, in a matter of months, racked up debts totaling more than two thousand dollars. Allan refused to honor them, even though Poe was at some risk of finding himself in debtor’s prison. Poe ran off. There followed a series of huffy pronouncements and stormy departures; most ended in Poe begging Allan for money. “I am in the greatest necessity, not having tasted food since Yesterday morning,” Poe wrote. “I have nowhere to sleep at night, but roam about the Streets.” Allan was unmoved. Poe enlisted in the army and served for two years as Edgar A. Perry. In 1829, Fanny Allan died. Andrew Jackson was inaugurated. Poe, while awaiting a commission to West Point—having sent an application, and Allan’s fifty dollars, to Jackson’s secretary of war, John Eaton—submitted the manuscript for a book of poems to a publisher, who told him that he would publish it only if Poe would guarantee him against the loss. Allan refused to front the money. Poe moved to Baltimore, where he lived with his invalid grandmother; his aunt, Maria Clemm; his nine-yearold cousin, Virginia; and his brother, Henry, an alcoholic who was dying of consumption.

Jackson, meanwhile, refused to renew the charter of the Bank of the United States, run by Nicholas Biddle. Biddle insisted on the need for federal regulation of paper currency. Jackson and his supporters, known as “gold-bugs,” wanted no paper money at all.15 (“Gold-bug” was also slang for millionaire.) Between 1830 and 1837, while Biddle and Jackson battled, 347 state-chartered banks opened across the country. They printed their own money. In 1832, the year Jackson vetoed the extension of the national bank’s charter, $59 million of paper bills were in circulation; four years later, that number had reached $140 million. All this paper was backed up by very little coin.16 At the end of Jackson’s two terms, American banks held $57 million in paper money and only $10.5 million in gold.

Poe, who was broke, didn’t need a bank. He could treasure up funds, he came to believe, in his own brain. He read as much as he could, charging books out of the Baltimore Library. “There are minds which not only retain all receipts, but keep them at compound interest for ever,” he once wrote. “Knowledge breeds knowledge, as gold gold.”18 Poe may have thought his mind was a mint, but when his book of poems was finally published, it earned him nothing (exactly what all his collections of poetry earned). He sold one of Maria Clemm’s slaves. “I have tried to get the money for you from Mr. A a dozen times,” Poe wrote to one of his many creditors, “but he always shuffles me off.” And then he added, lying, “Mr. A is not very often sober.”

“I have an inveterate habit of speaking the truth,” Poe once wrote. That, too, was a lie. (That Poe lied so compulsively about his own life has proved the undoing of many a biographer.) 21 In 1830, Poe finally made it to West Point, where he pulled pranks.“I cannot believe a word he writes,” Allan wrote on the back of yet another letter from his wayward charge. After Poe was court-martialed, Allan, who had since married a woman twenty years his junior, cut Poe off entirely. Poe went to New York but, unable to support himself by writing, he left the city within three months, returning to Baltimore, to live with Mrs. Clemm and little Virginia. He published his first story, “Metzengerstein.” He won a prize of fifty dollars from the Baltimore Weekly Visitor for “MS in a Bottle.” The editor, who met him, later wrote,“I found him a state of starvation.” In these straits, Poe wrote “Berenice,” a story about a man who disinters his dead lover and yanks out all her teeth—“the white and glistening, and ghastly teeth of Berenice”—although this gets even grosser when, after he’s done it, he realizes she was still alive. It has been plausibly claimed that Poe wrote this story to make a very bad and cruel and long-winded joke about “bad taste.” Also: he was hungry.

John Allan died in 1834, a rich man. He left his vast estate, three plantations and two hundred slaves, to his second wife and their two children. He left Edgar A. Poe not a penny. The next year, Poe was hired as the editor of a new monthly magazine, the Southern Literary Messenger, in Richmond. He was paid sixty dollars a month, a modest salary but for him, a fortune. In 1836, Poe married Virginia Clemm. She was thirteen; he was twenty-seven; he said she was twenty-one. He called her his “darling little wifey.” (“I was a child and she was a child, / In a kingdom by the sea; / But we loved with a love that was more than love— / I and my Annabel Lee.”) Poe held the job at the Messenger for only fifteen months. He boasted that, under his editorship, the magazine’s circulation grew from 700 to 5,500, but, as the Poe scholar Thomas Whalen has discovered, this, too, was a lie. The magazine had thirteen hundred subscribers when Poe started, and eighteen hundred when he left.

Poe lied about the Messenger’s circulation because he was attempting to forge a career in the world of magazine publishing during very troubled economic times. And, plainly, he was a very troubled man. Quarreling with the publisher of the Messenger, Poe left the magazine and, in February 1837, moved to New York. The New-Yorker, a weekly magazine edited by Rufus Griswold, welcomed him, praising Poe’s work at the Messenger. Harper & Brothers was just about to publish Poe’s novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

Unfortunately, Poe arrived in New York just in time for Panic of 1837. With all that paper money, speculators had gone wild; in the West, there had been a land grab and, in the East, a housing bubble; in New York, real estate values had risen 150 percent. When the crash came, in the last weeks of Jackson’s presidency, bankruptcies swept the nation. In New York, riots broke out as the swelling ranks of the city’s poor broke into food shops. “Down with the panic makers,” one newspaper warned, promising, “A bright sun will soon dispel the remaining darkness.” But the skies didn’t clear. In April, one New Yorker wrote in his diary, “Wall Street. The blackness of darkness still hangeth over it. Failure on failure.” By the fall of 1837, nine out of ten eastern factories had closed. Five hundred desperate New Yorkers turned up to answer an ad for twenty day laborers, to be paid at the truly measly wage of four dollars a month.

Then Pym failed. Poe’s publisher had tried to pass the novel off as an authentic travel journal even as its author left a trail of clues to his oh-so clever hoax—“pym” being, for instance, an anagram for “imp.” This didn’t go over especially well. One reviewer called the book “an impudent attempt at humbugging the public.” Poe did not write another novel. He moved to Philadelphia and wrote more stories. During the seven-year depression that followed the Panic, as Whalen has shown, Poe wrote 90 percent fewer poems and twice as many tales. He insisted that this was an aesthetic choice. The tale, he insisted, affords “the best prose opportunity for display of the highest talent.” Any piece of truly worthy writing must be able to be read at a sitting in order to achieve a single dramatic effect, the Nevermore-ish end with which, Poe said,every work of Art must begin. Maybe. But writing a book was exactly the kind of long term investment Poe could not afford to make, especially with so little prospect of return. In the 1820s, books cost, on average, two dollars; during the depression, that price fell to fifty cents.

Poe had already started writing gothic stories before the economy collapsed. But, as a man of no independent means whatsoever, he was especially vulnerable to market forces, and he knew it. (That’s probably why he worked so hard at appearing so otherworldly, so Romantic.) Poe tried to deduce, from careful study, what sold best. “The history of all Magazines,” he concluded, “shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in nature—to Berenice.” Gothic stories—supernatural tales set, often, in medieval ruins—had been popular for decades.They were also rather interesting to write on a rainy day, as Mary Shelley discovered, and great fun to parody, as Jane Austen found out(both Frankenstein and Northanger Abbey were published in 1818, when Poe was in England). The genre had since gone to seed; most of it, in Poe’s lifetime, was fairly rotten. It did sell well, though. A philosophy of composition? No, what Poe developed was a philosophy of the literary marketplace. He had little choice. “The general market for literary wares,” he reported, during one of the worst years of the depression, “is in a state of stagnation.”

The problem with Poe comes to this. He needed to turn his pen to profit—his mind was a mint!—but he also wanted to signal, as with Pym, that he was lowering himself. Look! See! I’m brilliant! Even at writing dreck! This kind of thing isn’t usually terribly charming. Once in a while, someone attempted to point this out. Early on, a fellow writer explained to Poe why the brothers Harper had declined to publish Poe’s Tales of the Folio Club:

They object that there is a degree of obscurity in their application, which will prevent ordinary readers from comprehending their drift, and consequently from enjoying the fine satire they convey. It requires a degree of familiarity with various kinds of knowledge which they do not possess, to enable them to relish the joke; the dish is too refined for them to banquet on.

Poe found this advice difficult to take. In “How to Write an Article for Blackwood Magazine,” a story he wrote in 1838, he tried telling the joke more broadly. An aspiring writer of gothics visits Blackwood’s editor, seeking instruction. “Your writer of intensities must have very black ink, and a very big pen, with a very blunt nib,” the editor advises, then offers some examples of recent successes:

Let me see. There was “The Dead Alive,” a capital thing!—the record of a gentleman’s sensations when entombed before the breath was out of his body—full of tact, taste, terror, sentiment, metaphysics, and erudition. You would have sworn that the writer had been born and brought up in a coffin. Then we had the “Confessions of an Opium eater”—fine, very fine!—glorious imagination—deep philosophy—acute speculation—plenty of fire and fury, and a good spicing of the decidedly unintelligible. That was a nice bit of flummery, and went down the throats of the people delightfully. They would have it that Coleridge wrote thepaper—but not so. It was composed by my pet baboon, Juniper.

Still not so endearing.

Poe calibrated and recalibrated. Just how many ways can a writer insult his readers and get away with it? If you take Poe’s best horror stories at face value, they are terrifying, wonderfully, flawlessly, terrifying; they are masterpieces. They’re also dripping with contempt. “Half banter, half-satire,” is how Poe once described them.40 “The Tell-Tale Heart” reads more like three-quarters burlesque, especially when you think about the literary output of Juniper the baboon. A madman with super-acuity murders an old man and entombs the corpse beneath the floor. When the police arrive, the madman begins to hear the beating of his victim’s heart.

I felt that I must scream or die!—and now—again—hark!

louder! louder! louder! louder!—

      “Villains!” I shrieked, “dissemble no more! I admit the

deed!—tear up the planks!—here, here!—it is the beating of

his hideous heart!”

Most of Poe’s stories have this campy, floozy Boo! business at the end Poe knew these were cheap tricks. No one plays them better than he does. It wasn’t to everyone’s taste.The first editor to read “The Tell-Tale Heart” rejected it, writing back,“If Mr. Poe would condescend to furnish more quiet articles, he would be a most desirable correspondent.”

“The Humbug,” first published in The New Yorker, April 20, 2009, and collected in The Story of America: Essays on Origins by Jill Lepore. Copyright © 2012 by Princeton University Press. 

The Humbug. By Jill Lepore. Pen America,  October 23, 2013