Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy

by Jeffrey Meyers

This biography of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), a giant of American literature who invented both the horror and detective genres, is a portrait of extremes: a disinherited heir, a brilliant but exploited author and editor, a man who veered radically from temperance to rampant debauchery, and an agnostic who sought a return to religion at the end of his life. Acclaimed biographer Jeffrey Meyers explores the writer's turbulent life and career, including his marriage and multiple, simultaneous romances, his literary feuds, and his death at an early age under bizarre and troubling circumstances.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History, Biography Memoir

376 pages, Paperback

First published September 2, 1992

About the author

Jeffrey Meyers, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has recently been given an Award in Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Thirty of his books have been translated into fourteen languages and seven alphabets, and published on six continents. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Reviews

[Jeffrey Keeten · Rating 4 out of 5]

”Poe’s strange, melancholy loneliness, his obsession with plagiarism, his sensitivity to criticism, his frequent requests for money, his threats of rash behavior, his overweening pride, his humiliating self-abasement and his compulsive self-destruction all contributed to his caustic and corrosive character. Yet his sense of social grievance, his brooding temperament, his fecklessness, his excitable, imperious nature were balance by his Castilian courtesy, ‘polished manners, enormous erudition, formidable conversational abilities, and indescribable personal magnetism.’”


”Poe’s slightly tilted head, asymmetrical face and contorted expression, curling into a contemptuous sneer, reveal his ravaged condition four days after his suicide attempt in November 1848.”

Edgar Allan Poe was the first American writer to try and make a living with just the power of his pen and his prodigious imagination. Most of the other great writers of the age had university positions or rich wives to finance their scribbles. The term suffering artist might not have begun with Poe, but he certainly was the quintessential representative of the destitute, creative genius.

Edgar was abandoned by his father at barely one year of age and then orphaned by the time he was two. Both of his parents worked on the stage, but his mother was much more successful than his father. Edgar always had a flair for the dramatic, and it isn’t hard to see that, though he never knew his parents, their skills were still part of his persona. From his mother to his stepmother to his child bride, Poe was cursed with losing the women who were most important to him. His melancholy may have been somewhat chemical, but it was burnished to a darker hue by true sorrow.

The most interesting relationship was his contentious association with his adopted father, John Allan, who donated his surname to be Edgar’s middle name . Allan was a very successful Scottish merchant, who vacillated from lavishing attention and money on Edgar to being stern, condemning, and frugal. He raised Edgar Allan Poe to be a gentleman, but did not always give him the means with which to live as one. Part of the problem came from the fact that John Allan was a self-made man and wanted Edgar to find his own footing. This disagreement between them came to a head at the University of Virginia where Poe was excelling. Allan gave him only a fraction of what he needed to live on, and Poe gambled poorly to try to make up the rest of the money. Not exactly what Allan had in mind.

I do believe this is the point where Edgar Allan Poe’s life started the descent into a lifelong struggle with poverty. He left the university without a degree. He then joined the military to spite his stepfather. This is going to be a theme of Poe’s life, his special talent to cut his nose off to spite his face. He then went to West Point and was doing really well with his studies, but decided he didn’t want to continue in the military so managed to become dishonorably discharged.


The beautiful, but delicate in health, Francis Allan, who was Edgar’s stepmother and occasional ally in regards to his stepfather.

He made things worse, of course, by accusing his stepfather for all his failures, even as he asked for more money from him. Jeffrey Meyers included some of these surviving letters, and to be honest, I can perfectly understand why John Allan lost all patience with his stepson, which ultimately led to his disinheritance.

Ugghhh! I did, at several points in this book, want to give EAP a good shake.

There are numerous stories of people who helped Poe throughout his life, and it was a rare instance when they did not regret offering the help. He couldn’t help evaluating friends with cutting remarks. He felt misunderstood, and certainly he was right about that. His type of genius was undoubtedly unique in the 19th century, and few could fully appreciate how innovative a writer he was becoming.

Poe worked for numerous publications during his lifetime, and in every case, the power of his pen made those periodicals successful. Subscriptions jumped radically each year. He was very good at making other men rich, but just as things were reaching a really good point, he would blow it up. He’d go on a bender and disappear for several days which usually resulted in heated words with his employer. Self-destructive behavior plagued him his whole life. He had a terrible drinking problem and difficulty dealing with any kind of setback or for that matter any kind of success.

He wrote many book reviews, and he was unmerciful in his attacks on authors and their works. He was very personal with his evaluations and left many writers bruised and battered with his attacks. Poe called it unleashing his tomahawk. He truly meant to scalp his fellow writers at every opportunity. For someone who was so sensitive to criticism, he did not put himself in the shoes of those who were suffering under the onslaught of his malicious reviews. One of his favorite targets was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I’m surprised Longfellow didn’t challenge Poe to a duel. He did the opposite, in fact.

”What a melancholy death is that of Mr. Poe---a man so richly endowed with genius! I never knew him personally, but have always entertained a high appreciation of his powers as a prose-writer and a poet. His prose is remarkably vigorous, direct and yet affluent; and his verse has a particular charm of melody, an atmosphere of true poetry about it, which is very winning. The harshness of his criticisms, I have never attributed to anything but the irritation of a sensitive nature, chafed by some indefinite sense of wrong.”


Virginia Clemm Poe, the source of much guilt for Edgar due to his inability to make enough money to properly help her with her health issues. I’ve always thought of her as this fragile waif of a girl, but from contemporary accounts, she was indeed fragile, but was curvaceous and very womanly in appearance.

Longfellow also bought five editions of Poe’s work to help out the destitute Maria Clemm, the mother/Poe’s aunt of his wife Virginia, who tried her best to take care of him in his later years. The contrast between how Poe conducted himself and how Longfellow conducted himself is very telling, about how someone who should despise Poe could still see the good in him even though Poe had tried his best to eviscerate Longfellow. I don’t know much about Longfellow, but he must have been very comfortable with his abilities, and certainly, unlike many of Poe’s enemies, and they were numerous, he didn’t feel the need to splinter the bones of the corpse.

This biography gives me a clearer, more defined view of the character of Edgar Allan Poe. Like many people of genius throughout history, he was immature, reactive, self-destructive, and difficult to like. Women found him hypnotic, well mannered, baffling, and attractive, though as he tried to find a wife after Virginia died, he found it easy to obtain their attention but difficult, with his erratic history, to convince any of them to marry him. These older, intelligent women of means, the perfect match for a starving writer, were too savvy to put their futures in jeopardy with such an unreliable man, regardless of how handsome and captivating he might be. For those dedicated Poe fans out there, as am I, this might be like meeting the man for the first time.

If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten

[Justin Tate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mesmerizing! I'm a Poe fan with some working knowledge of his tragic life, but this biography blew my mind. I mistakenly assumed concrete details would be shrouded in uncertainty and speculation, like many figures who were born over two hundred years ago. That's not the case at all.

Meyers writes accurate history with the aid of a seemingly endless supply of personal letters, including very private exchanges between Poe and his foster father, women of romantic/financial interest, publishers, fellow geniuses, and practically everyone else he ever interacted with. I guess people hoarded letters back then like we hoard emails today??

With no television, journalists were extra detailed with their reporting. Poe's successful lecture series, for example, was attended by the press and they paint a very clear picture of his tone, mannerisms, and audience reactions. Since much of Poe's squabbles with the literary community were often conducted through print media, there's also a very public history of his relationship with friends and enemies.

While Poe's original biographers no doubt deserve more credit for gathering this wealth of materials and interviewing Poe's acquaintances shortly after his death, Meyers expertly maneuvers reams of research into a chronological and digestible storyline that is quintessentially American.

Poe's life story remains the familiar tragic tale of the struggling author, one who submits their works to magazines and literary awards, hoping to be paid a nickel or receive enough praise to justify the hard living. Despite his crippling poverty, Poe stood steadfast in his literary passion to the bitter end and ultimately achieved greatness—even if he would have probably preferred regular meals and a warm blanket for his dying wife. His renowned alcoholism is certainly explored here, but the understanding of his physical disability overshadows much of the condescension that he merely drank away all of his hard-earned money.

Meyers' biography is rich with direct quotes and historical evidence, which I love, but I really appreciate that he makes these quotes bite-sized and contextualized. Being well-versed on the topic, he’s able to explain hidden subtext or ironies from details which might otherwise be missed by the average reader. He’s also not afraid to summarize when necessary. Though the 300 pages breeze by, the substantive weight of information feels more like 3,000. An accomplishment that's nothing short of miraculous, in my opinion.

For a well-rounded, exhaustive understanding of Edgar Allan Poe, it’s hard to imagine a better text than this. It’s entertaining, fair-minded, expertly paced, and digested enough that you don’t have to give up a year of your life to read it. I know it’s only January, but guaranteed this will be one of my favorite reads of 2022.

[Paul Haspel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Edgar Allan Poe lived a short, turbulent, poverty-plagued, and often unhappy life; but his literary and cultural legacy lives on, stronger than ever, more than 160 years after Poe’s mysterious death in Baltimore in 1849. Jeffrey Meyers captures all of those themes well in Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy.

Meyers, a prolific literary biographer, has written about the life and work of Joseph Conrad, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Frost, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, T.E. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Robert Lowell, Katherine Mansfield, George Orwell, and Edmund Wilson. Accordingly, there is a newness of perspective to Meyers’s approach to Poe that I found refreshing. Poe studies is an area of its own within American literary scholarship – a specialized field that can sometimes become too specialized for its own good. For Meyers, Poe is just another writer to study. What a healthy difference.

This difference stands forth well when Meyers considers Poe’s relationship with his wife Virginia. After pointing out how some biographers have suggested that Poe was impotent, or that Virginia was frigid, Meyers points out, accurately, that "Autobiographical elements in Poe’s works suggest that [his and Virginia’s] sexual life was normal" (p. 86; emphasis in original). These words needed to be written, as they speak to a long-standing bias in psychoanalytic criticism, for Poe as for other authors. Too often, the psychoanalytic critic, throwing an author onto the proverbial couch – in many cases, long after said author has died – treats an author’s life as a puzzle to which all the answers can be found through the proper application of a Freudian or Jungian or Lacanian template. Excuse me – gentlemen, ladies? Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And I for one am much more comfortable believing that Poe and Virginia enjoyed all aspects of their brief time together – physical as well as spiritual love – than I would be in psychoanalyzing the dead. Evidently Meyers feels the same way.

Meyers is conscientious in seeking patterns in Poe’s life, and in relating those patterns to what is known about the lives of his parents – as when Meyers writes of Poe’s 1844 relocation from Philadelphia to New York City that “In April 1844 Poe left Philadelphia, as he had left Baltimore and Richmond after previous failures. In New York he resumed the rootless and impoverished life that his actor-parents had led” (p. 150).

Meyers’s observations regarding Poe’s literature are likewise well-grounded. Pointing out that “Poe had published half his poems by 1831” [when he was just 22 years old!], Meyers adds that “Poe’s major poetic themes include victimization, power and powerlessness, confrontations with mysterious presences, extreme states of being, dehumanization and its cure, the relation of body and soul, memory of and mourning for the dead, the need for spiritual transcendence and affirmation” (p. 51). Similarly, when it comes to Poe’s well-known preference for composing short stories and relatively brief poems, Meyers points out that “All of Poe’s more ambitious long works �� ‘Al Aaraaf,’ Politian, [The Narrative of Arthur Gordon] Pym and The Journal of Julius Rodman -- remained unfinished” (p. 100).

With any author, biographical experience influences what one writes, and Meyers shows well these intersections in the life and literature of Edgar Allan Poe. Particularly strong in that regard is Meyers’s description of Poe’s travails in 1846, a period when Poe’s beloved wife Virginia was in the last stages of the tuberculosis that would kill her. “During his war with the Literati in 1846,” Meyers writes, “Poe had lost most of his friends and had been attacked by his enemies. He was ill, dreadfully poor and deeply depressed” (p. 200). Small wonder, then, that it was during this period that Poe composed one of his greatest short stories, “The Cask of Amontillado.” It is difficult to argue with Meyers’s suggestion that “This tale…may have expressed [Poe’s] own desire for revenge against the troublesome enemies who had also insulted and injured him”, considering the manner in which the story’s protagonist “commits the perfect crime – avenging himself with impunity – and manages to escape detection” (p. 201).

Meyers emphasizes the aimless and self-destructive quality of Poe’s final years – a context within which the grim story of Poe’s mysterious death in Baltimore unfolds. While there is much that we do not know about Poe’s whereabouts and actions between 28 September and 3 October 1849, “We do know…that he died under exceptionally ugly, wretched and pitiful conditions” (p. 252). It is a relief to turn from that grim tableau to two final chapters on Poe’s reputation and influence. The “Reputation” chapter discusses how, Poe’s post-mortem defamation by his literary executor Rufus Griswold notwithstanding, his reputation as an author steadily grew – first in Europe, and then in his American homeland. (Merci, France.)

And in the “Influence” chapter, Meyers seems very much at home, comfortable in his knowledge of the literary history of many nations. The authors whom Meyers describes as having been influenced, in one way or another, by Edgar Allan Poe include Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Stephen Spender, Aldous Huxley, Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, Henry James, Eugene O’Neill, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, Edmund Wilson, Randall Jarrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tom Wolfe, Hart Crane, Sylvia Plath, D.H. Lawrence, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, Herman Melville, and Vladimir Nabokov.

Meyers concludes, persuasively, that “Though Poe has always appealed to popular taste, his originality and imagination have also had a considerable impact on the most advanced thinkers and most serious writers. Poe has…remained contemporary because he has always appealed to basic human feelings and expressed universal themes common to all men in all languages: dreams, love, loss; grief, mourning, alienation; terror, revenge, murder; insanity, disease and death” (p. 304).

Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy provides a good and concise look at how Poe’s dramatic and often tragic life contributed to the immortal literature he gave to the world.

[Sketchbook · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poe (1809-1849) was the first American writer, notes the author, to support himself entirely by his writing. Longfellow & Lowell were professors, Emerson was a clergyman, Cooper-Irving-Hawthorne had diplomatic appointments. ~~ It took 100 years for his artistic reputation to be firmly established here. By contrast, the French never questioned his status.

Poe's orphaned, insecure, desperate life is not a pleasant journey. Author Meyers concludes with about 50 pages citing his unique influence on towering literary figures, which makes this a singular book.

[Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars rounded up. A readable, comprehensive, evenhanded biography.

[Popo9694 · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best non-biased biographies I’ve ever read

[Janice · Rating 2 out of 5]

This made for an interesting read about a fascinating (and sad) life. Meyers makes extensive use of Poe's written work as well as facts about his life to build a compelling read. That said, I had some issues with his scholarship.

The first clue, a small one, was Meyers' assertion that Poe lived in room 13 on the West Range at UVA. Now, I attended UVA, so I have visited this room, set aside in Poe's honor with some historically accurate furnishings and a stuffed raven, and so I happen to know that UVA does not have a record of which room precisely Poe lived in. They selected 13 as an appropriately ominous number for the master of horror stories and creepy poems. Which, if you stop to think about it, is a much more likely explanation than that he happened to be assigned to 13, of all rooms. As I said, a small error, but I think it is representative of the many small missteps I found along the way.

Since I was reading a collection of Poe's works simultaneously with this biography, I was able to compare my readings of the stories with Meyers', and they did not always agree. For example, Meyers cites "The Businessman" as a story that lashes out at Poe's adopted father, a businessman. This is a logical conclusion, given the title and tone of the story, and given Poe's troubled relationship with Allen. However, the story does not actually satirize businessmen like his foster father. Rather, the main character scornfully rejects legitimate business practices in favor of a series of "jobs" that involve swindling people. Meyers offered no evidence that suggested Allen was dishonest. Meyers argues that the story's lampooning of the narrator's actions was a comment on Allen's materialism, but if this is the case, surely Poe wouldn't have made a point of having his narrator explicitly reject his father's chosen profession.

Less problematic, but still irritating to me, is Meyers' tendency to treat literary interpretation as fact instead of opinion. Most notably, he asserts matter-of-factly that Roderick and Madeline Usher have an incestuous relationship. This Freudian reading of "Fall of the House of Usher" is not a new one, and is certainly a valid possibility, but it isn't the only one--nothing in the story makes such a reading inevitable. I think Meyers may be used to writing literary analysis. Within the context of an article or book of interpretation, such straightforward assertions are understood by the reader as an argument, rather than as fact. Within a biography, this distinction gets blurred.

Finally, and worst of all, Meyers occasionally uses Poe's works to diagnose the author's state of mind, a biographer's sin that he roundly (and justly) condemns in others. While he rejects strenuously concluding that Poe was insane just because some of his narrators are, he himself blithely suggests that when the narrator kills his blameless wife in "The Black Cat," this reflects Poe's own wish for his wife's death. Again, as with the literary interpretation, this is not an impossible reading (Virginia at the time was dying a slow, painful death of tuberculosis). However, this is not FACT, and I find it objectionable to treat it as such. "Given the pain Poe experienced in watching his wife die slowly by inches, it is not hard to imagine that the death of the narrator's wife, brutal but swift, was a fictional release for the tortured author." See? That wasn't so hard.

[James Henderson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jeffrey Meyers is noted for his literary biographies and he succeeds with this biography of Edgar Allan Poe. The details of Poe's mysterious and tragic life are laid out with clarity. He explores Poe's contrariness that bordered on the pathological as he ruined every project he attempted. From journalism to friendship to marriage his life was a failure. I was impressed with the few sturdy friends who persevered in spite of Poe's stubborn behavior. If not for these few who hired him for journal's and at least temporarily lifted him out of the gutter he would have had an even shorter and more brutal life.
The wonder of it all was the stories, poetry, and criticism that he produced. It fills two volumes in the Library of America edition and it is mostly good and sometimes great. It is with his works that Meyers also proves an excellent guide, for he combines psychological insight and literary acumen in his brief precis and analysis of the stories and poems. The impact of Poe outside of the United States and on contemporary writers like Nabokov is also presented. The sum of Meyer's work is a complete portrait of Poe the American literary master.

[Sara Espinosa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have no words. You know it's sad when even the own biographer starts to give up on their subject. Having little knowledge about Poe's life, I went in to his biography with a fresh, open mind. I was familiar with his work, but not his life. For starters, this book was 300+ pages with very small print, but for an extensive book in length, I feel like the content couldn't stretch to fill it. Poe's life was full of misfortune, tragedy and very preventable problems, and although the biographer went in-depth into each stage of his life, I couldn't help but feel repetition. After the first few chapters of his family and early life, I felt like Poe's life followed a cycle of fights, unemployment, poverty, drinking and rejection. Even the narrator's seemingly impartial voice started to give up on him halfway. I wanted to keep reading because I really wanted to finish, not because I wanted to know more because there was nothing new to learn. I also feel like the timeline jumped back and forth it was harder to keep up or recall certain events. In summary, this biography was a mental gymnastics exercise, having to associate Poe's literature with events in his life or inspiration from other writers. The part I enjoyed the most was the last chapter, "inspiration." It was refreshing to see that even though Poe did not enjoy fame or as much praise while living, his work lived on and inspired so much of what we know of pop culture today. It was a high note to end on after an unfortunate narrative with a not so likable subject.

[Hope Glidden · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have lately been obsessed with Poe - having visited the museums in Baltimore, Philadelphia and Richmond. Poe was a sorry sort, and most likely suffered from some sort of psychological affliction. This book presents a decent review of Poe's life based on what little information is available, and makes conjectures about his life that are plausible based on what is known.

I deducted a start simply because the author spends too much time analyzing Poe's work and interweaving his opinion into the biography. I think this would have worked better as a separate section - because now if I want to compare my thoughts with Meyers' I have to dig back through the book.

[Andrew]

Poe has always fascinated me, and this slim biography was a good opportunity for me to brush up on his life story. The author, who has written many biographies of other writers, makes an effort to set the scene in which Poe lived, share interpretations of his work, and trace his legacy in the years since his death. I sometimes questioned the author's assertions, like who a certain poem was about, or what this or that symbolized in a story. I probably would have appreciated the last two chapters (on Poe's reputation and influence respectively) if I read more fiction, but I enjoy (in moderation) keeping up with what writers are saying about other writers.

[Alex Stephenson · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading a slew of thick, hefty tomes, it's refreshing to find a biography on the shorter side that still pilots the reader down a sea of info. Never getting too lost in the mystique or conspiracies, Meyers tries to identify the man behind Edgar, and does a compelling, convincing job at doing so.

[Eric Layton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought I knew a lot about one of my favorite authors, but I learned even more in just the first two chapters of this very interesting book. If you're a Poe fan, you should definitely find a copy (at your local library, maybe) and read this book.

[Greg Jolley · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating and ultimately sad and accurate insight into an artist of brilliance. Also, while not intended, a masterful description of the destruction brought on by alcoholism.

[nicole · Rating 3 out of 5]

apush!

[Ronnie Cobb · Rating 3 out of 5]

read

[Amy Romine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I learned a lot. Very memorable and great

[Casey]

This was so dry. I wish I'd read the Wikipedia entry on Poe instead. When will I learn to put it down and move onto to something else?!
I am wondering though if my dissatisfaction is more about the the time period. Have I read an exceptionally good bio about a person of the 1800's? I thought the Mark Twain bio was long and dry; maybe it's the result of solely working from letters.

[Lindsay · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd say I'd give this about a 2.5 stars, maybe a 2.75. I'm pretty neutral on it, leaning towards liking it. It was very educational and detailed. I learned things I didn't know and it definitely influenced how I see Edgar Allan Poe.
I'm currently writing an extensive review on this book for school, so I don't want to write much more here.

[Ron Dakron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Meyers manages to portray Poe in his pathos to bathos and back again--a match for Poe's brilliant prose and amazingly awful poetry.

[Stephanie S · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb. Meyers takes the reader along the path of a life that arguably parallels the blackness of Poe's genius, with the surprising addition of multiple female confidants. Could not put it down.

[Chuck · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author presents a flesh and blood portrait of Poe, who, sadly, is known more as a caricature. Unfortunately, the book is a little dry and, at times, laborious.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I especially liked Meyers's chapter on Poe's influence on later writers...