Edgar Allan Poe

The Works of Edgar Allan Poe

Born in poverty at Boston, January 19, 1809, dying under painful circumstances at Baltimore, October 7, 1849, his whole literary career of scarcely fifteen years a pitiful struggle for meresubsistence, his memory malignantly misrepresented by his earliest biographer, Griswold, howcompletely has truth at last routed falsehood and how magnificently has Poe come into his own. For"The Raven," first published in 1845, and, within a few months, read, recited and parodied whereverthe English language was spoken, the half-starved poet received $10! Less than a year later hisbrother poet, N. P. Willis, issued this touching appeal to the admirers of genius on behalf of theneglected author, his dying wife and her devoted mother, then living under very straitenedcircumstances in a little cottage at Fordham, N. Y.: "Here is one of the finest scholars, one of the most original men of genius, and one of the mostindustrious of the literary profession of our country, whose temporary suspension of labor, frombodily illness, drops him immediately to a level with the common objects of public charity. There isno intermediate stopping-place, no respectful shelter, where, with the delicacy due to genius andculture, he might secure aid, till, with returning health, he would resume his labors, and hisunmortified sense of independence