I. A Benefit for Mrs. Poe

Late in the autumn of 1811 the Richmond newspapers ran an appeal on behalf of an actress who could no longer act. Elizabeth Arnold Poe had been playing in the Virginia capital that season and was now confined by illness, and the theatrical company proposed a benefit performance, the standard nineteenth-century instrument for converting public sympathy into rent money. The notices asked the charitable citizens of Richmond to remember a young woman who had given them pleasure and who now lay ill with two small children — the number and identity of the children varying with the notice, which is itself instructive. She was twenty-four, or thereabouts; even her birth year is an approximation. She died on December 8. The benefit did not save her, and it is likely that some part of the money raised went, as such money did, to the apothecary and the undertaker.

This is where the documentary life of Edgar Poe effectively begins: not with a birth certificate, which does not exist, but with a solicitation printed in a newspaper on behalf of his dying mother. He was not yet three years old, and already the terms of his existence had been set out in the columns of the press — talent, illness, insufficient income, an appeal to strangers, a public accounting of private distress. He would spend the remaining thirty-eight years of his life inside variations of that arrangement, and would die inside one.

Eighteen days after Elizabeth Poe’s death, on the night after Christmas, the Richmond Theatre burned to the ground during a performance. Something like seventy people died, among them the governor of Virginia. The city’s Episcopal and Presbyterian clergy, who had been warning against the moral hazards of the stage, found the coincidence irresistible; a Monumental Church was raised on the site, and the ashes of the dead were interred beneath it. Whatever else this meant, it meant that Edgar Poe’s earliest social position was established by two events in the same December: the theater had orphaned him and the theater had been declared an abomination. He would be raised in a mercantile Presbyterian household in a city that had just decided actors were a species of arsonist.

Writing this life requires an unusual amount of preliminary honesty about what can and cannot be known, because Poe is simultaneously one of the most recognizable figures in the history of American writing and one of the worst-documented. Several hundred authenticated letters survive, along with editorial correspondence, a scattering of manuscripts, army and academy records, marriage bonds, court files, and the printed traces of a career conducted almost entirely in magazines. There is no diary. There is no notebook of accounts. There is no confidant who preserved a systematic record. What fills the vacuum is reminiscence — the memories of schoolfellows, editors, hostesses, rivals, admirers, and physicians, nearly all of it set down after 1849, most of it after 1870, much of it in response to requests from biographers who had already decided what kind of story they were assembling. Several of these witnesses had grudges. Several had investments. One of them had the copyright.

The result is a life in which the legend is better attested than the facts, in the crude sense that the legend has been repeated more often. It is possible to believe simultaneously that Poe was a penniless drunkard who died in a gutter and that he was a martyred aristocrat of letters destroyed by a vulgar republic, because both portraits were manufactured by interested parties within a generation of his death and have been in continuous circulation ever since. The evidence supports neither. It supports something less satisfying and considerably more interesting: a professional writer of formidable intelligence and erratic judgment who worked for twenty years inside an American magazine economy that was structurally incapable of paying him a living, who made that economy’s problems worse for himself through pride, combativeness, and periodic catastrophic drinking, and who produced, in the intervals, a body of work that reorganized several branches of modern literature.

Grief was constant in his life, and so was debt, and so was illness in the people he loved. None of these explains the work. Thousands of nineteenth-century Americans were orphaned, impoverished, and widowed without writing “Ligeia.” What the circumstances explain is the shape of the career — why he wrote in short forms, why he wrote for magazines, why he wrote so much criticism, why he spent a decade chasing a journal of his own, why he took the fees he took and moved when he moved. The biography that follows tries to keep those two orders of explanation apart, and to say plainly, when it cannot.

Of his parents, something is known and much is guessed. Elizabeth Arnold had arrived in Boston from England early in 1796, a child of nine, with her mother, an actress and singer also named Elizabeth Arnold. The mother died within a few years. The daughter was on the American stage by the age of nine or ten, and by her mid-teens was a working professional playing in the itinerant companies that circulated between Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Norfolk, Charleston, and Richmond. She married an actor, Charles Hopkins, in 1802; he died in 1805; she married David Poe, Jr., in 1806. In roughly fifteen years on the stage she is recorded ...