November 4, 2025 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Edgar Allan Poe is best known for his dark tales and haunting poems, yet his imagination stretched far beyond the macabre. Behind the tragedies that shaped his life was a writer who helped define Gothic literature, pioneered detective fiction, and even ventured into the earliest forms of science fiction. Chris Semtner, curator at the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia, reveals the wit, creativity, and depth of one of America’s most enduring literary voices.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
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
(00:30):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Chris Poe was born in eighteen o nine, 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
(01:12):
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 Junior, who is Edgar's father, and
(01:37):
he appears to run out in the family. Left Poe's
mother to finn for herself and three kids. And when
she was dying here in Richmond, some local ladies heard
the famous actress missus Poe is in ill health, she's
out of resources, and they started bringing her meals. Even
(01:57):
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 Francis Valentine Allen, and she agrew 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's just twenty four.
(02:18):
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 Allen's went to England
and Scotland, so he got to see Europe for a
little while. He got to go to a good boarding
(02:39):
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. Pape practically grew up in that river.
He describes how he sailed out to the little islands
or swim. He's been with the best swimmers ever in
(03:00):
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 Hm again.
He's maybe still down there. But Poe also developed love
for poetry. His foster father never really warmed up to him,
(03:23):
never legally adopted him, but he was an importer export.
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 Hellaspot. That's part
(03:46):
of the reason why Poe swam so much in the
James River. He's trying to be like Byron. But while
Poe is 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 has dedicated to her. He thought she was hell Detroit,
the most beautiful woman who ever lived. The problem was
(04:07):
he's fourteen. She's 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's a nice, weird kid. But then shortly after they met,
she went insane and died, and that left a lasting
impression on the Poe. When he's growing up, his mother
(04:29):
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
(04:57):
another girl's 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,
(05:19):
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
(05:39):
he got to write poetry in his free time. And
while he's out there, poet 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, mister Allen, 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 exit sport business. So Poe was there
(06:02):
no money, Alan 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
two thousand dollars in debt. After the first nine months,
he couldn't stay there, dropped out of college, came back
here and found out El Meyra had dumped him. She'd
(06:23):
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
cool ship. He's eighteen years old and just ran away
from Homie. 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,
(06:46):
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's
all boys back then, But so she thought she'd been forgotten.
She accepted proposal from somebody else, and that's who she married.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
And you've been listening to Chris Sempner 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 hbib here, and I'm inviting
(07:31):
you to help our American Stories celebrate this country's two
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Go to Ouramerican Stories dot com and click the donate button.
(07:54):
Any amount helps Go to Ouramerican Stories dot com and give,
and we're back with our American Stories and the story
of Edgar Allen Poe. Chris Simpner, curator at the Poe
(08:15):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
So he decided he's going to see the world, have
all sorts of ventures. He enlisted the US 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's a clerk for while he's artificery, mixed
(08:55):
gunpower and explosive, really technical, demanding job. We know he's
good at because he didn't blow off on 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,
(09:17):
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 leiter's recommendations. Also back here in Richmond,
the Allens were friends with General Winfield Scott. And this
is a guy who was in the War of eighteen twelve,
the Seminole Wars, Mexican American War. He was even later
an advisor to Lincoln during the Civil War. So this
(09:41):
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, Francis Allan, was sick and
(10:06):
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 Francis Allen's sake.
And Alan helped him get out of his enlistment. Because
he still has enlistment, he still has to serve that.
(10:28):
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 can get somebody for twenty five dollars. But Poe's desperate,
so he also this guy, Bully Grave seventy five dollars
a big chunk of change to take his place, but
never paid him. And Alan had the money. Allen's worth
about three corps million dollars, so this guy's bill gates,
(10:48):
but he didn't want to pay for it. Pue 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, Alan has it,
so ask him, So he wrote Alan, Alan Actley, I'm
not paying you. So Bully wrote Poe again while Poe's
at West Point and says, Alan says, he's done anything
about It's a Poe write speck. You know, Alan, he's
(11:10):
not sober very often. He probably just got drunk and
forgot about the whole thing. So you need probablys to
be reminded. And that letter we found in Allan's file,
so apparently bullies showed that to Alan says, oh, yeah,
your son's talking smack about you. He says, you're drunk.
And about that time when Alan cut Poe off for
good and Poe deicide. West Point was not the place
(11:33):
for him. He hated it there. He's racking up demerits
left and right. But the cadets loved him. They thought
he's a funny guy, the great sense of humor, a
practical joker, and they all chipped in, about over one
hundred and twenty five 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
(11:54):
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 ubscenitis 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,
(12:17):
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's 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,
(12:40):
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
mister Allen reading the latest British magazines that Alan was importing,
and they wanted scary, weird, mysterious stories. So Poe put
together a bunch of bizarre stories, and he heard there
(13:02):
was a contest coming up one hundred dollars for the
best story, a huge chunk of change for 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.
(13:26):
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
(13:47):
to force his way into the house past Allen's second wife,
and Alan just shook his kene 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.
(14:09):
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.
(14:32):
He's making a decent living, which was not too much
today today, the equivalent of seventeen thousand 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
(14:55):
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 five hundred copies a month.
Nobody's buying it. The idea was that all the big
(15:15):
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 baron Icy, and he
very specifically was told, you know, we need to write
stories that would educate and entertain the public without offending them.
(15:35):
And Baron I See is a love story about and a
man named Aegis who falls in love with his young cousin,
baron Icy. And this Aegis 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 baron Icy smile and can think of nothing else
(15:59):
but her ruscious, 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 servants banging the door says,
wake up, snap out of it. Your wife wasn't really dead.
(16:22):
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 morals. You should ban
this sort of thing. But Poe almost got fired here,
(16:44):
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
Jele in the South. He had a national reputation.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
And you've been listening to Chris Sempner, the curator at
the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia, and that James River
six miles Poe swam, and it's still a record by
the way upstream, no joke, and what a story we're
hearing about loss, about the writer's struggle and still to
this day the artists struggle as it is. And he
(17:22):
had to pay the bills, and he had this idea,
he had this inner knowledge of what the people wanted,
and he gave it to them. And when we come back,
we're going to learn more about what happens next in
Poe's remarkable life. Here on our American Stories, and we're
(18:08):
back with our American Stories and the story of American
author Edgar Allen Poe. We last heard that poet published
one of his famously eerie stories and been threatened with
termination from the magazine's writing staff, until the magazine's readership
went up sevenfold and started Poe's assent as a national figure.
(18:30):
Let's return to the curator of the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia,
Chris Sempner.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
So people the big cities were reading Poe. Now they
knew of him. So from here he was able to
move to New York and then to Philadelphia, and go
from one magazine to the next publishing, and so of
the biggest magazines of the country, like Godie's Lais book
was such a circulation about one hundred thousand copies. That's
where The Cask of Amontiada was first printed. Stilly's struggling
(18:59):
to make a li i because some of his stories
that follow along this vein were a little bit too
much like the Telltale Heart got rejected by the Boston Michelini.
They said, we've got to accept something a little bit
quieter next time. And so he only got paid ten
dollars for that by the Boston Pioneer, which you know,
it's desperately needed money. But these kind of stories they
(19:21):
attracted an audience. But he wanted to show people that
he could write more diverse things. He wrote a story
called Hans Fall in the magazine. It was about a
fellow who to escape his debt collector, something Poe knew
very well, decided why don't I just build a spaceship
and go to the moon. So post said, well, what
kind of spaceship would get you there? Definitely have to
be sealed up so that you wouldn't die as soon
(19:41):
as you left the r's atmosphere, and how quickly would
it have to travel in order to break free of
theirs atmosphere? How long would it take to get to
the moon. And he started thinking about the science behind
the fiction, and that's when he sort of gave birth
to a new genre. Well before it's time science fiction.
He wrote stories about balloon trips and about the future.
(20:04):
Malonta talked to us about the year twenty eight forty eight,
how we're all flying across the ocean. Rather than sale
to get three weeks to get to England, you're just
zipping back and forth in the area. You're communicating electronically
long distance across the ocean. So he had visions of
what the future would be like. But he also used
his science fiction as a way to comment on contemporary society,
(20:24):
so he's always very interested in that. And Jules Vern
still a kid when the story came out seven years old.
When Hanswall was published about the Trip to the Moon.
He grew up reading Poe's works and he said, he's
onto something. I like this scientific verril simitude, this idea
of science used to make a fantastic story seem possible,
(20:46):
and that may have inspired Verne to make his living
as the great science fiction are the father of science fiction.
But why is this important? If you really think about it.
We've been to the moon, and the people who started
our space program, they said when they grew growing up,
they're reading Jules Verne. Poe was interested in the minds
(21:14):
of the murders, and he actually at one point reported
on a trial. There's a fellow, James Wood, who's on
trial for murder, and he claimed that he'd been insane.
He claimed he's not guilty by reason insanity. So Poe
was reporting on the case for his magazine and watching
the way Wood acted, and he said, well, you know,
(21:35):
everybody expects that someone who's insane issnna be ranting and raving,
because that's the way we've seen in literature and in art.
But he's been calm and everything he says, and maybe
that's a sign of his insanity. And I think that's
one of the sources possibly for the Taeiltale heart. This
guy who assures you he's not insane, See how calmly,
(21:56):
how healthy, I can tell the whole tale that this
is a guy that's just boiling underneath the surface and
pull on to find out what is that underneath the
surface that separates the madman from the seine. What is it?
And in some of the stories he writes about this
this urge within us that you know, we have this
(22:17):
ego telling us what's to do. We have this feeling
of what's right and wrong, but then we have this
dark force inside of us he sometimes calls the imp
of the perverse, that makes us do the wrong thing
for the wrong thing's sake, to do harm to ourselves.
That feeling when we're on the edge of a cliff,
it's urging us to jump off the cliff, even though
we know it's going to destroy us. But he's also
(22:39):
interested in the new science of criminology. There's a fellow Jhinvidoc,
the French chief of chief of police, who was a
former criminal who became the police chief. And he starts
studying the way crime scenes can be analyzed, the way
criminals behave. And this is a time of post writing it.
New York City still didn't have a police department. The
(23:00):
word detective is not yet into the English language. This
combination of close observation and analysis and Poe created a
new hero, a new kind of fictional hero hadn't seen before.
He's not the typical hero. He's not brave or or
(23:21):
powerful or strong or anything like that. This is a
guy who works entirely within his mind. His name is
a Goosetupan, and he and his sidekick seemed to solve
in possible crimes just by using reason and analysis. For
one crime, there's two women have been murdered inside a
locker room that still locked from the inside. When the
(23:41):
police break down the door and Dupan studies the crimes,
seeing looks for things that are out of place, like
some strands of hair that don't quite look human, and
Poe launched a new literary genre of the detective story
just a year later, So this was eighteen forty one.
And later the same year, There's a lady called Mary Rogers.
(24:05):
She was very popular cigar store clerk in New York
City when proper ladies didn't typically work in cigar stores.
And then all of a sudden she disappeared, and she
was missing for three days and they found her floating
in the Hudson River off of Hoboken. Back then, either
had to catch something in the actor get a confession.
Nobody confessed that they gave up and said, you know
(24:25):
what that is the Irish. There's a lot of Irish
and German immigrants come in the United States then forming gangs.
You probably see moves like the gangs of New York.
And they said, probably a gang of hoodlums killed her.
And there's nearby roadhouse sort of near where she was
found in Hoboken, and the lady living there, Henrietta Loss, said, oh, yeah,
(24:48):
I think I think I heard some gang of hoodlums
out there that night, and yeah, it's probably just hoodlums
killed her. And Poe said, well, that doesn't make any sense.
We know there's been really wards offered, and somebody would
turned in the other guys to get the award for
a gang. And also these scratch marks in are back
indicates you as drags the river. A gang would have
just picked her up and dumped her in the river.
(25:10):
We're looking for somebody different. And not only that, Poe
wrote letters different magazines saying I figured out I I
cracked the case, and you know, so I won't get
sued for libel or anything like that. I'm going to
change the setting from New York to Paris, and I'm
going to make the hero of the story, my old
fictional detective Augusta Pan. But all the crime scene and
(25:31):
everything I described is going to match up to the
real case, and it all matches up to the real
newspaper descriptions. And he said, and in some of his
letters he wrote to magazines and Baltimore and Boston saying,
you know, this is not just going to be an
entertaining story. This is going to be a road map
that law enforcement can use in the future to solve
(25:51):
cases just like this. So he wanted there to be
practical applications for this. He wanted this to change the
way that we investigate crimes. So he really saw this
as being a game changer. So the story got in print,
and he never did solve the mystery because at the
very end there's a note from the editors basically saying
they only be sued for libel by say anybody's name,
(26:14):
So not gonna tell you did it. But they said,
you know, you can pretty much just follow the clues
and figure out who did it. And Poe claim that
he'd always solved it but that he couldn't tell you.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
And you've been listening to Chris Sempner, curator of the
Poe Museum, telling the story of Edgar Allan Poe and
a diversified literary portfolio Poe assembled from poetry to science
fiction to literally creating the detective story. And it didn't
exist before he did it. This genre did not exist,
(26:48):
and by the way, it actually helped detectives be better detectives.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
In the end.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
What we learn here also is how one person's vision
affects another and then affects real life. The science behind
science fiction interested Poe. His work influenced Jules vern Jules
Verne's work influences our astronauts who end up going to
space because of something in print. More of the story
of Edgar Allan Poe here on our American Stories, and
(27:37):
we're back with our American stories and the final part
of our story on the life of Edgar Allen Poe.
We just heard from Chris Sempterner that Poe was instrumental
in creating a brand new genre of storytelling the detective story,
and it claimed to have solved a real life murder mystery.
Back to Chris with a final portion of this tale.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
Eventually he moved up to Philadelphia, so Richmond to New
York to Philadelphia, that's where he published The Merge and
The Room Orgue. He published The Goldbug The Black Cat.
He started to make a name for himself. Things were
starting to go his way, and he was getting pretty
comfortab working at Graham's Magazine, which became the most popular
magazine in the country at the time. And one night
(28:24):
his wife was singing the piano and she started coughing
up blood and they realized she had tuberculosis. This was
a death sentence. There was no cure for it, other
than maybe some mercury pills, which would kill you by
giving you mercury poisoning, kill you some other way. So
he spent the next five years trying to figure out
(28:46):
what would help her, and nothing really could. They didn't
really have any cure. The certain kind of beer they
gave her that probably wouldn't do anything. They thought cold,
fresh air would help her, maybe just giving pneumonia instead.
Still undeterred, he moved from there to New York City
and really wanted to make a splash there. And as
(29:08):
soon as he got there, he reported in the New
York Sun that somebody had just crossed the ocean a
high air balloon. Everybody rushed out to buy the papers
and learn all about it. It turns of the whole
thing was fake. He'd played a hoax on everybody, but
it got him noticed. So Poe was getting popular, his
stories are getting read. But he still wanted to be
(29:29):
recognized as a poet. And he'd worked for months and
months on this perfect poem. This is going to be
a good one hundred line poem, much longer than a
lot of the other things he'd written. And he finally
got out the nerve to sent to a publisher, into
Graham's magazine. He used to work for Graham's magazine. The editor,
the owner of the magazine loved him, and they wouldn't
publish it, and he took another magazine rejected, and at
(29:51):
one magazine they passed around the room and read it,
and they felt so sorry for him that they passed
around a hat to collect donations. Well, we can't buy
his poem because it's awful, but at least we'll give him,
you know, a few bucks to get some food. And
Pere were saying, this poem doesn't make any sense. Why
is a guy talking to a bird that obviously only
(30:14):
knows how to say one word? Why would you keep
asking it questions if it's only going to give the
same word answer, especially if you don't want that answer,
like tell this soul with sorrow, lady with then the
distant aiden, it shall class the saintan maiden whom the
angels named Leonore. Why would you ask the raven if
you're ever gonna be reunited with your beloved Leonore? If
(30:37):
you know it's gonna tell you never more? Doesn't make
any sense. But the guy's torturing himself. He's he's driving
himself to do this. This guy is really picking at
a scab. He knows that he's he longs for Leonore,
So why would he keep asking the raven to say nevermore?
To remind him that he can never see her again?
(30:57):
And finally he got it published. He didn't get it
published a literary magazine. It got it published in a
political journal for the Whig Party called the American Review.
And they paid him the space rates of the day.
They get about fifteen dollars, which about three hundred fifty
dollars days money, So not great, but it's filler material.
And he didn't even put his name on it. He
(31:17):
said to one person, is so bad he don want
to ruin his reputation, but put his name on it,
so it's side of the pseudonym Quarrels. And as soon
as it got in print, another magazine saw it and
the editor reprinted it without paying him, but at least
they printed under his name, and they added an introduction
that said, this will stick to the memory of everyone
who ever reads it. And today we knows that's true
(31:40):
because you can't hear the word never more without thinking
of Edgar Allan Poe and the Raven. So that's the
one that made him a huge superstar, and he was
able to travel the country giving performances of it, so
finally achieved that stardom. But this is also when his
wife was dying and she encouraged him to move to
(32:02):
the country. They thought the fresh country air would help him,
so they moved to a tiny cottage in the Bronx.
The Bronx used to be the countryside about fifteen miles
outside New York City, and that's where she died at
the age of twenty four. He only survived for another
two years, and he spent a lot of that traveling.
But finally at the end of his life he was
back in Richmond and he was lecturing at the Exchange Hotel,
(32:23):
the biggest hotel in town, spending time with his sister,
catching up with old friends, and he happened to hear
that his old girlfriend, Almira was single now. So he
started showing up at her house. And the first time
he showed up al the blue, but he kept coming
back and coming back until she accepted him. And he
convinced her that they should be married after all those years,
(32:45):
and he got her a nice gold engagement ring, got
her gold block. It was on of his hair inside
of it. But she agreed to marryhim, and she wrote
a letter to his aunt, remember his biological father's sister
or his mother in law. She's still up the cottage
in the Bronx. I'll pose traveling, and Elmira said, I
never really stopped loving Edgar. And Elmira also wrote to
(33:08):
Muddy that I look forward to calling you mother into
welcome me you into my home. So she was going
to take Poe's mother in law in with her. So
imagine having your husband's first wife's mother living with you.
But she was going to bring her into the house
along with her son or something about ten years old.
Her daughter was a teenager, so she'd already married and
move out of the house by then, but it was
(33:31):
going to be probably a full house, and Edgar would
have to go back to the Bronx. He's going to
go as far as New York can pick up his
mother in law and bring her back here for the wedding.
So he caught the early morning steamship. He was very sick,
and Elmyer said he had a fever and a weak
pulse and it was kind of dizzy. She said, you
shouldn't travel. Stay here a few more days, even visit
(33:51):
a doctor, and the doctor said, you know, if he traveled,
be the death you. I don't know exactly what was
wrong with Poe, but he made as far as Baltimore.
The steamship would have taken in from here to Norfolk
to Baltimore, and then he would call a train to Philadelphia.
And he disappeared for five days. When they found him,
he was still in Baltimore. Then they took him to
the hospital where he was in and out of consciousness
(34:13):
for four days, delirious, talking to shadows on the wall,
not making any sense. But he kept saying, I have
a wife back in Richmond. I had to get back
to my wife. But he died ten days before he
could marry Almira, ten days before he had a happy ending.
And the only clue he gave us was he screamed
the name Reynolds over and over again his very last night,
(34:33):
and then he calmed down and his last words were, Lord,
helped my poor soul. And he died at the age
of forty. The doctor said his case of phrenitis or
inflammation in the brain, which kind of could catch all,
which could mean meningitis, but could mean other things. And
he was buried up there in Baltimore. They tend to
bury you where he died. It was unmarked grave as
(34:55):
soon overgrown with weeds, but people kept coming to see
the grave. They kept wanting to see it, and the
sext and finally put a rock on there so he'd
know where the grave was, so he could show you, Oh,
that's where he's buried, right there. And it was twenty
six years after he died. Teachers and students who love
reading pose works really got behind this idea of putting
(35:16):
a monument on Po's grave, and they got in the
nicest monument to the whole cemetery, too big for the spot.
Where he was in fact, so they decided to put
the monument in a place of honor right next to
the cemetery gate, so right in there the sidewalk, so
you wouldn't even have to break into the cemetery to
see it. It would be right there as his face on
the front, this big, huge thing. So after all these years,
it was the kids who loved reading Poe's works and
(35:39):
the teachers who loved teaching post works and sharing them
that got behind the idea of building him a monument
for his grave. And even if it was in a
different spot, they actually had to dig him up and
move him across the cemetery to go to the new spot.
And so that's where he's today. And he's been memorialized
by teachers and artists and writers ever since Sir Rothur
Colin Doyle. So they're really he wasn't much original you
(36:01):
could do after Poe that he invented the detective story.
He said, where was the detective story? Before Poe breathed
the breath of life into it? He established the genre,
the characters, the different plot devices. He did a whole
series of these detective stories, and Jules Verne called the
leader of the Cult of the Bizarre. Poe's first American
(36:22):
writer will really make a huge impact around the world,
not just to be popular overseas, like say Washington Irving,
but actually to be influential overseas. Actually changed the way
other writers thought about their art. The gold Bug, and
It's about an eccentric entomologist named la Grand Leagran says
he's got a drawing, but he doesn't have the drawing.
(36:43):
Turns out he holds a piece of parchment over a flame,
reveals there's invisible ink. There's a whole encoded message that
gives him the series of clues he has to follow
to find Captain Kidd's treasure. It's basically it's the plot
of the Goonies also National Treasure da Vinciko. They of
the origins in this story. H. P. Lovecraft wrote a
whole book about the history of weird fiction. Oh, it's
(37:06):
a whole chapter to pose. Other people have to share chapters,
but Poe gets his own chapter. There was a film director,
Alfred Hitchcock, who said that it's because I liked reading
Poe's work so much that I started to make suspense films.
Everyone should come to the Edgroll and Poe Museum, Richmond,
because where else are you going to see pose socks
or his hair or the Poe museumcats.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
A terrific job on the editing and storytelling by Shad
Straley and Robbie Davis, and his special thanks to Chris Sempner,
curator of the Poe Museum in Richmond. Go to pomuseum
dot org. And by the way, the story of how
the Raven got shopped around and rejected everywhere is the
story of art. But the persistence of Poe, the perseverance
(37:52):
of Poe against all odds to stick with it, and
that he creates these new genres so much so that
legends like Sir Arthur Conan, Doyle and Hitchcock in England
are affected. And these are masters of their domain. The
story of Edgar Allan Poe an American classic. Here on
all American 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
(00:30):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Chris Poe was born in eighteen o nine, 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
(01:12):
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 Junior, who is Edgar's father, and
(01:37):
he appears to run out in the family. Left Poe's
mother to finn for herself and three kids. And when
she was dying here in Richmond, some local ladies heard
the famous actress missus Poe is in ill health, she's
out of resources, and they started bringing her meals. Even
(01:57):
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 Francis Valentine Allen, and she agrew 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's just twenty four.
(02:18):
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 Allen's went to England
and Scotland, so he got to see Europe for a
little while. He got to go to a good boarding
(02:39):
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. Pape practically grew up in that river.
He describes how he sailed out to the little islands
or swim. He's been with the best swimmers ever in
(03:00):
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 Hm again.
He's maybe still down there. But Poe also developed love
for poetry. His foster father never really warmed up to him,
(03:23):
never legally adopted him, but he was an importer export.
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 Hellaspot. That's part
(03:46):
of the reason why Poe swam so much in the
James River. He's trying to be like Byron. But while
Poe is 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 has dedicated to her. He thought she was hell Detroit,
the most beautiful woman who ever lived. The problem was
(04:07):
he's fourteen. She's 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's a nice, weird kid. But then shortly after they met,
she went insane and died, and that left a lasting
impression on the Poe. When he's growing up, his mother
(04:29):
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
(04:57):
another girl's 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,
(05:19):
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
(05:39):
he got to write poetry in his free time. And
while he's out there, poet 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, mister Allen, 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 exit sport business. So Poe was there
(06:02):
no money, Alan 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
two thousand dollars in debt. After the first nine months,
he couldn't stay there, dropped out of college, came back
here and found out El Meyra had dumped him. She'd
(06:23):
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
cool ship. He's eighteen years old and just ran away
from Homie. 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,
(06:46):
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's
all boys back then, But so she thought she'd been forgotten.
She accepted proposal from somebody else, and that's who she married.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
And you've been listening to Chris Sempner 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 hbib here, and I'm inviting
(07:31):
you to help our American Stories celebrate this country's two
hundred and fiftieth 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 Ouramerican Stories dot com and click the donate button.
(07:54):
Any amount helps Go to Ouramerican Stories dot com and give,
and we're back with our American Stories and the story
of Edgar Allen Poe. Chris Simpner, curator at the Poe
(08:15):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
So he decided he's going to see the world, have
all sorts of ventures. He enlisted the US 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's a clerk for while he's artificery, mixed
(08:55):
gunpower and explosive, really technical, demanding job. We know he's
good at because he didn't blow off on 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,
(09:17):
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 leiter's recommendations. Also back here in Richmond,
the Allens were friends with General Winfield Scott. And this
is a guy who was in the War of eighteen twelve,
the Seminole Wars, Mexican American War. He was even later
an advisor to Lincoln during the Civil War. So this
(09:41):
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, Francis Allan, was sick and
(10:06):
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 Francis Allen's sake.
And Alan helped him get out of his enlistment. Because
he still has enlistment, he still has to serve that.
(10:28):
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 can get somebody for twenty five dollars. But Poe's desperate,
so he also this guy, Bully Grave seventy five dollars
a big chunk of change to take his place, but
never paid him. And Alan had the money. Allen's worth
about three corps million dollars, so this guy's bill gates,
(10:48):
but he didn't want to pay for it. Pue 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, Alan has it,
so ask him, So he wrote Alan, Alan Actley, I'm
not paying you. So Bully wrote Poe again while Poe's
at West Point and says, Alan says, he's done anything
about It's a Poe write speck. You know, Alan, he's
(11:10):
not sober very often. He probably just got drunk and
forgot about the whole thing. So you need probablys to
be reminded. And that letter we found in Allan's file,
so apparently bullies showed that to Alan says, oh, yeah,
your son's talking smack about you. He says, you're drunk.
And about that time when Alan cut Poe off for
good and Poe deicide. West Point was not the place
(11:33):
for him. He hated it there. He's racking up demerits
left and right. But the cadets loved him. They thought
he's a funny guy, the great sense of humor, a
practical joker, and they all chipped in, about over one
hundred and twenty five 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
(11:54):
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 ubscenitis 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,
(12:17):
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's 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,
(12:40):
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
mister Allen reading the latest British magazines that Alan was importing,
and they wanted scary, weird, mysterious stories. So Poe put
together a bunch of bizarre stories, and he heard there
(13:02):
was a contest coming up one hundred dollars for the
best story, a huge chunk of change for 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.
(13:26):
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
(13:47):
to force his way into the house past Allen's second wife,
and Alan just shook his kene 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.
(14:09):
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.
(14:32):
He's making a decent living, which was not too much
today today, the equivalent of seventeen thousand 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
(14:55):
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 five hundred copies a month.
Nobody's buying it. The idea was that all the big
(15:15):
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 baron Icy, and he
very specifically was told, you know, we need to write
stories that would educate and entertain the public without offending them.
(15:35):
And Baron I See is a love story about and a
man named Aegis who falls in love with his young cousin,
baron Icy. And this Aegis 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 baron Icy smile and can think of nothing else
(15:59):
but her ruscious, 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 servants banging the door says,
wake up, snap out of it. Your wife wasn't really dead.
(16:22):
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 morals. You should ban
this sort of thing. But Poe almost got fired here,
(16:44):
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
Jele in the South. He had a national reputation.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
And you've been listening to Chris Sempner, the curator at
the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia, and that James River
six miles Poe swam, and it's still a record by
the way upstream, no joke, and what a story we're
hearing about loss, about the writer's struggle and still to
this day the artists struggle as it is. And he
(17:22):
had to pay the bills, and he had this idea,
he had this inner knowledge of what the people wanted,
and he gave it to them. And when we come back,
we're going to learn more about what happens next in
Poe's remarkable life. Here on our American Stories, and we're
(18:08):
back with our American Stories and the story of American
author Edgar Allen Poe. We last heard that poet published
one of his famously eerie stories and been threatened with
termination from the magazine's writing staff, until the magazine's readership
went up sevenfold and started Poe's assent as a national figure.
(18:30):
Let's return to the curator of the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia,
Chris Sempner.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
So people the big cities were reading Poe. Now they
knew of him. So from here he was able to
move to New York and then to Philadelphia, and go
from one magazine to the next publishing, and so of
the biggest magazines of the country, like Godie's Lais book
was such a circulation about one hundred thousand copies. That's
where The Cask of Amontiada was first printed. Stilly's struggling
(18:59):
to make a li i because some of his stories
that follow along this vein were a little bit too
much like the Telltale Heart got rejected by the Boston Michelini.
They said, we've got to accept something a little bit
quieter next time. And so he only got paid ten
dollars for that by the Boston Pioneer, which you know,
it's desperately needed money. But these kind of stories they
(19:21):
attracted an audience. But he wanted to show people that
he could write more diverse things. He wrote a story
called Hans Fall in the magazine. It was about a
fellow who to escape his debt collector, something Poe knew
very well, decided why don't I just build a spaceship
and go to the moon. So post said, well, what
kind of spaceship would get you there? Definitely have to
be sealed up so that you wouldn't die as soon
(19:41):
as you left the r's atmosphere, and how quickly would
it have to travel in order to break free of
theirs atmosphere? How long would it take to get to
the moon. And he started thinking about the science behind
the fiction, and that's when he sort of gave birth
to a new genre. Well before it's time science fiction.
He wrote stories about balloon trips and about the future.
(20:04):
Malonta talked to us about the year twenty eight forty eight,
how we're all flying across the ocean. Rather than sale
to get three weeks to get to England, you're just
zipping back and forth in the area. You're communicating electronically
long distance across the ocean. So he had visions of
what the future would be like. But he also used
his science fiction as a way to comment on contemporary society,
(20:24):
so he's always very interested in that. And Jules Vern
still a kid when the story came out seven years old.
When Hanswall was published about the Trip to the Moon.
He grew up reading Poe's works and he said, he's
onto something. I like this scientific verril simitude, this idea
of science used to make a fantastic story seem possible,
(20:46):
and that may have inspired Verne to make his living
as the great science fiction are the father of science fiction.
But why is this important? If you really think about it.
We've been to the moon, and the people who started
our space program, they said when they grew growing up,
they're reading Jules Verne. Poe was interested in the minds
(21:14):
of the murders, and he actually at one point reported
on a trial. There's a fellow, James Wood, who's on
trial for murder, and he claimed that he'd been insane.
He claimed he's not guilty by reason insanity. So Poe
was reporting on the case for his magazine and watching
the way Wood acted, and he said, well, you know,
(21:35):
everybody expects that someone who's insane issnna be ranting and raving,
because that's the way we've seen in literature and in art.
But he's been calm and everything he says, and maybe
that's a sign of his insanity. And I think that's
one of the sources possibly for the Taeiltale heart. This
guy who assures you he's not insane, See how calmly,
(21:56):
how healthy, I can tell the whole tale that this
is a guy that's just boiling underneath the surface and
pull on to find out what is that underneath the
surface that separates the madman from the seine. What is it?
And in some of the stories he writes about this
this urge within us that you know, we have this
(22:17):
ego telling us what's to do. We have this feeling
of what's right and wrong, but then we have this
dark force inside of us he sometimes calls the imp
of the perverse, that makes us do the wrong thing
for the wrong thing's sake, to do harm to ourselves.
That feeling when we're on the edge of a cliff,
it's urging us to jump off the cliff, even though
we know it's going to destroy us. But he's also
(22:39):
interested in the new science of criminology. There's a fellow Jhinvidoc,
the French chief of chief of police, who was a
former criminal who became the police chief. And he starts
studying the way crime scenes can be analyzed, the way
criminals behave. And this is a time of post writing it.
New York City still didn't have a police department. The
(23:00):
word detective is not yet into the English language. This
combination of close observation and analysis and Poe created a
new hero, a new kind of fictional hero hadn't seen before.
He's not the typical hero. He's not brave or or
(23:21):
powerful or strong or anything like that. This is a
guy who works entirely within his mind. His name is
a Goosetupan, and he and his sidekick seemed to solve
in possible crimes just by using reason and analysis. For
one crime, there's two women have been murdered inside a
locker room that still locked from the inside. When the
(23:41):
police break down the door and Dupan studies the crimes,
seeing looks for things that are out of place, like
some strands of hair that don't quite look human, and
Poe launched a new literary genre of the detective story
just a year later, So this was eighteen forty one.
And later the same year, There's a lady called Mary Rogers.
(24:05):
She was very popular cigar store clerk in New York
City when proper ladies didn't typically work in cigar stores.
And then all of a sudden she disappeared, and she
was missing for three days and they found her floating
in the Hudson River off of Hoboken. Back then, either
had to catch something in the actor get a confession.
Nobody confessed that they gave up and said, you know
(24:25):
what that is the Irish. There's a lot of Irish
and German immigrants come in the United States then forming gangs.
You probably see moves like the gangs of New York.
And they said, probably a gang of hoodlums killed her.
And there's nearby roadhouse sort of near where she was
found in Hoboken, and the lady living there, Henrietta Loss, said, oh, yeah,
(24:48):
I think I think I heard some gang of hoodlums
out there that night, and yeah, it's probably just hoodlums
killed her. And Poe said, well, that doesn't make any sense.
We know there's been really wards offered, and somebody would
turned in the other guys to get the award for
a gang. And also these scratch marks in are back
indicates you as drags the river. A gang would have
just picked her up and dumped her in the river.
(25:10):
We're looking for somebody different. And not only that, Poe
wrote letters different magazines saying I figured out I I
cracked the case, and you know, so I won't get
sued for libel or anything like that. I'm going to
change the setting from New York to Paris, and I'm
going to make the hero of the story, my old
fictional detective Augusta Pan. But all the crime scene and
(25:31):
everything I described is going to match up to the
real case, and it all matches up to the real
newspaper descriptions. And he said, and in some of his
letters he wrote to magazines and Baltimore and Boston saying,
you know, this is not just going to be an
entertaining story. This is going to be a road map
that law enforcement can use in the future to solve
(25:51):
cases just like this. So he wanted there to be
practical applications for this. He wanted this to change the
way that we investigate crimes. So he really saw this
as being a game changer. So the story got in print,
and he never did solve the mystery because at the
very end there's a note from the editors basically saying
they only be sued for libel by say anybody's name,
(26:14):
So not gonna tell you did it. But they said,
you know, you can pretty much just follow the clues
and figure out who did it. And Poe claim that
he'd always solved it but that he couldn't tell you.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
And you've been listening to Chris Sempner, curator of the
Poe Museum, telling the story of Edgar Allan Poe and
a diversified literary portfolio Poe assembled from poetry to science
fiction to literally creating the detective story. And it didn't
exist before he did it. This genre did not exist,
(26:48):
and by the way, it actually helped detectives be better detectives.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
In the end.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
What we learn here also is how one person's vision
affects another and then affects real life. The science behind
science fiction interested Poe. His work influenced Jules vern Jules
Verne's work influences our astronauts who end up going to
space because of something in print. More of the story
of Edgar Allan Poe here on our American Stories, and
(27:37):
we're back with our American stories and the final part
of our story on the life of Edgar Allen Poe.
We just heard from Chris Sempterner that Poe was instrumental
in creating a brand new genre of storytelling the detective story,
and it claimed to have solved a real life murder mystery.
Back to Chris with a final portion of this tale.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
Eventually he moved up to Philadelphia, so Richmond to New
York to Philadelphia, that's where he published The Merge and
The Room Orgue. He published The Goldbug The Black Cat.
He started to make a name for himself. Things were
starting to go his way, and he was getting pretty
comfortab working at Graham's Magazine, which became the most popular
magazine in the country at the time. And one night
(28:24):
his wife was singing the piano and she started coughing
up blood and they realized she had tuberculosis. This was
a death sentence. There was no cure for it, other
than maybe some mercury pills, which would kill you by
giving you mercury poisoning, kill you some other way. So
he spent the next five years trying to figure out
(28:46):
what would help her, and nothing really could. They didn't
really have any cure. The certain kind of beer they
gave her that probably wouldn't do anything. They thought cold,
fresh air would help her, maybe just giving pneumonia instead.
Still undeterred, he moved from there to New York City
and really wanted to make a splash there. And as
(29:08):
soon as he got there, he reported in the New
York Sun that somebody had just crossed the ocean a
high air balloon. Everybody rushed out to buy the papers
and learn all about it. It turns of the whole
thing was fake. He'd played a hoax on everybody, but
it got him noticed. So Poe was getting popular, his
stories are getting read. But he still wanted to be
(29:29):
recognized as a poet. And he'd worked for months and
months on this perfect poem. This is going to be
a good one hundred line poem, much longer than a
lot of the other things he'd written. And he finally
got out the nerve to sent to a publisher, into
Graham's magazine. He used to work for Graham's magazine. The editor,
the owner of the magazine loved him, and they wouldn't
publish it, and he took another magazine rejected, and at
(29:51):
one magazine they passed around the room and read it,
and they felt so sorry for him that they passed
around a hat to collect donations. Well, we can't buy
his poem because it's awful, but at least we'll give him,
you know, a few bucks to get some food. And
Pere were saying, this poem doesn't make any sense. Why
is a guy talking to a bird that obviously only
(30:14):
knows how to say one word? Why would you keep
asking it questions if it's only going to give the
same word answer, especially if you don't want that answer,
like tell this soul with sorrow, lady with then the
distant aiden, it shall class the saintan maiden whom the
angels named Leonore. Why would you ask the raven if
you're ever gonna be reunited with your beloved Leonore? If
(30:37):
you know it's gonna tell you never more? Doesn't make
any sense. But the guy's torturing himself. He's he's driving
himself to do this. This guy is really picking at
a scab. He knows that he's he longs for Leonore,
So why would he keep asking the raven to say nevermore?
To remind him that he can never see her again?
(30:57):
And finally he got it published. He didn't get it
published a literary magazine. It got it published in a
political journal for the Whig Party called the American Review.
And they paid him the space rates of the day.
They get about fifteen dollars, which about three hundred fifty
dollars days money, So not great, but it's filler material.
And he didn't even put his name on it. He
(31:17):
said to one person, is so bad he don want
to ruin his reputation, but put his name on it,
so it's side of the pseudonym Quarrels. And as soon
as it got in print, another magazine saw it and
the editor reprinted it without paying him, but at least
they printed under his name, and they added an introduction
that said, this will stick to the memory of everyone
who ever reads it. And today we knows that's true
(31:40):
because you can't hear the word never more without thinking
of Edgar Allan Poe and the Raven. So that's the
one that made him a huge superstar, and he was
able to travel the country giving performances of it, so
finally achieved that stardom. But this is also when his
wife was dying and she encouraged him to move to
(32:02):
the country. They thought the fresh country air would help him,
so they moved to a tiny cottage in the Bronx.
The Bronx used to be the countryside about fifteen miles
outside New York City, and that's where she died at
the age of twenty four. He only survived for another
two years, and he spent a lot of that traveling.
But finally at the end of his life he was
back in Richmond and he was lecturing at the Exchange Hotel,
(32:23):
the biggest hotel in town, spending time with his sister,
catching up with old friends, and he happened to hear
that his old girlfriend, Almira was single now. So he
started showing up at her house. And the first time
he showed up al the blue, but he kept coming
back and coming back until she accepted him. And he
convinced her that they should be married after all those years,
(32:45):
and he got her a nice gold engagement ring, got
her gold block. It was on of his hair inside
of it. But she agreed to marryhim, and she wrote
a letter to his aunt, remember his biological father's sister
or his mother in law. She's still up the cottage
in the Bronx. I'll pose traveling, and Elmira said, I
never really stopped loving Edgar. And Elmira also wrote to
(33:08):
Muddy that I look forward to calling you mother into
welcome me you into my home. So she was going
to take Poe's mother in law in with her. So
imagine having your husband's first wife's mother living with you.
But she was going to bring her into the house
along with her son or something about ten years old.
Her daughter was a teenager, so she'd already married and
move out of the house by then, but it was
(33:31):
going to be probably a full house, and Edgar would
have to go back to the Bronx. He's going to
go as far as New York can pick up his
mother in law and bring her back here for the wedding.
So he caught the early morning steamship. He was very sick,
and Elmyer said he had a fever and a weak
pulse and it was kind of dizzy. She said, you
shouldn't travel. Stay here a few more days, even visit
(33:51):
a doctor, and the doctor said, you know, if he traveled,
be the death you. I don't know exactly what was
wrong with Poe, but he made as far as Baltimore.
The steamship would have taken in from here to Norfolk
to Baltimore, and then he would call a train to Philadelphia.
And he disappeared for five days. When they found him,
he was still in Baltimore. Then they took him to
the hospital where he was in and out of consciousness
(34:13):
for four days, delirious, talking to shadows on the wall,
not making any sense. But he kept saying, I have
a wife back in Richmond. I had to get back
to my wife. But he died ten days before he
could marry Almira, ten days before he had a happy ending.
And the only clue he gave us was he screamed
the name Reynolds over and over again his very last night,
(34:33):
and then he calmed down and his last words were, Lord,
helped my poor soul. And he died at the age
of forty. The doctor said his case of phrenitis or
inflammation in the brain, which kind of could catch all,
which could mean meningitis, but could mean other things. And
he was buried up there in Baltimore. They tend to
bury you where he died. It was unmarked grave as
(34:55):
soon overgrown with weeds, but people kept coming to see
the grave. They kept wanting to see it, and the
sext and finally put a rock on there so he'd
know where the grave was, so he could show you, Oh,
that's where he's buried, right there. And it was twenty
six years after he died. Teachers and students who love
reading pose works really got behind this idea of putting
(35:16):
a monument on Po's grave, and they got in the
nicest monument to the whole cemetery, too big for the spot.
Where he was in fact, so they decided to put
the monument in a place of honor right next to
the cemetery gate, so right in there the sidewalk, so
you wouldn't even have to break into the cemetery to
see it. It would be right there as his face on
the front, this big, huge thing. So after all these years,
it was the kids who loved reading Poe's works and
(35:39):
the teachers who loved teaching post works and sharing them
that got behind the idea of building him a monument
for his grave. And even if it was in a
different spot, they actually had to dig him up and
move him across the cemetery to go to the new spot.
And so that's where he's today. And he's been memorialized
by teachers and artists and writers ever since Sir Rothur
Colin Doyle. So they're really he wasn't much original you
(36:01):
could do after Poe that he invented the detective story.
He said, where was the detective story? Before Poe breathed
the breath of life into it? He established the genre,
the characters, the different plot devices. He did a whole
series of these detective stories, and Jules Verne called the
leader of the Cult of the Bizarre. Poe's first American
(36:22):
writer will really make a huge impact around the world,
not just to be popular overseas, like say Washington Irving,
but actually to be influential overseas. Actually changed the way
other writers thought about their art. The gold Bug, and
It's about an eccentric entomologist named la Grand Leagran says
he's got a drawing, but he doesn't have the drawing.
(36:43):
Turns out he holds a piece of parchment over a flame,
reveals there's invisible ink. There's a whole encoded message that
gives him the series of clues he has to follow
to find Captain Kidd's treasure. It's basically it's the plot
of the Goonies also National Treasure da Vinciko. They of
the origins in this story. H. P. Lovecraft wrote a
whole book about the history of weird fiction. Oh, it's
(37:06):
a whole chapter to pose. Other people have to share chapters,
but Poe gets his own chapter. There was a film director,
Alfred Hitchcock, who said that it's because I liked reading
Poe's work so much that I started to make suspense films.
Everyone should come to the Edgroll and Poe Museum, Richmond,
because where else are you going to see pose socks
or his hair or the Poe museumcats.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
A terrific job on the editing and storytelling by Shad
Straley and Robbie Davis, and his special thanks to Chris Sempner,
curator of the Poe Museum in Richmond. Go to pomuseum
dot org. And by the way, the story of how
the Raven got shopped around and rejected everywhere is the
story of art. But the persistence of Poe, the perseverance
(37:52):
of Poe against all odds to stick with it, and
that he creates these new genres so much so that
legends like Sir Arthur Conan, Doyle and Hitchcock in England
are affected. And these are masters of their domain. The
story of Edgar Allan Poe an American classic. Here on
all American stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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