Fun Facts - Edgar Allan Poe

UPDATE: Contrary to the claims on the comments of this post, these facts were not invented by my sick mind. If you want confirmation, go read an actual book about his life, instead of just trusting whatever Google shows you. Real research is made by confrontation of several different sources, not by copying the first article you can find.

The man himself.

• His birthday is only 2 days before mine.
• Even though he helped invent science-fiction and detective stories, technically speaking he is best described as an “American Romantic”.
• He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone. Obviously, he failed.
• His father left his family when he was 1 year old. His mother died of “consumption” (a.k.a. tuberculosis) when he was 2.
• Bot his parents were actors and prolly named him after a character from King Lear.
• After his parents died, he was raised by his uncle, a merchant who dealt with several different products, such as tombstones and slaves.
• Poe attended the University of Virginia, but he couldn’t afford it with the money his foster dad sent him, so he left.
• After leaving University, Poe tried a career in the military.
• While in the army, he self-published his first book, a collection of poems. It had 40 pages, and had no success, partly because its title was not “Poe’s Poems”.
• Inbetween military schools, he published a second book of poetry, with some poems from the first book and a few new ones. His fellow West Point cadets raised him money to publish a third collection of poetry, again with some of the old ones, and again without success.
• After leaving the army, at age 24, he won a literary award for “Manuscript Found in a Bottle”.
• When he was 26 he married his cousin.
• After the success of his first published story, he was offered a job at a newspaper, but they kicked him out because he was always drunk.
• By the time he was 30, he released “Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque” to mixed reviews. His publishers paid him with 20 free copies of the two volumes of the book, and no royalties.
  
• Poe was 33 when his wife Virginia, who was 16 years old, started to suffer from “consumption”. She died 2 years later.
• When Poe published “The Raven”, it was a tremendous success. He received 9 dollars for it. (something like US$227 today)
• When Poe was 40 years old, he was found rambling in the streets of Baltimore, wearing clothes that did not belong to him. He was taken to the hospital and died 4 days later, of “congestion of the brain” and “cerebral inflammation”, which translating to today’s medical talk would be “we have no idea why this man died, but we think he’s kinda weird; besides, he’s really drunk”.
• As if his life had not been miserable enough, after Poe died a man named Rufus Wilmot Griswold, using a fake name, published a terrible obituary. Rufus hated Poe so much, he even went on to become Poe’s literary executor, and re-released his works in book form, adding to them a fake biography describing him as depraved, drunk, drug-addict, and other terrible things that started with the letter D. Since this was the only Poe biography around, many people reproduced this text, and an entire generation of people read his works as if they had been written by the Antichrist himself.
• The letters Rufus claimed to have as proof of Poe’s bad habits had been forged by himself.
• Even though he is now considered a genius of gothic horror, science fiction and detective stories, Poe wasn’t exactly in love with these genres. He just used elements of them because the mass market readers enjoyed them.
• Some of his stories, like “Metzengerstein”, started out as satires of certain popular genres of the time.
• Poe was one of the first American authors of the 19th century to become more popular in Europe than in the United States, thanks to the translations made by Charles Baudelaire.
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle inspired himself in Poe’s detective stories to create the Sherlock Holmes series. According to him, “each [of Poe's detective stories] is a root from which a whole literature has developed”.
• Jules Verne was such a big fan of Poe that he wrote a sequel to “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket” called “An Antarctic Mystery”, also known as “The Sphinx of the Ice Fields”.
• Since 1949, every year, on the day of Poe’s birthday, a man walks through the cemetery where he is buried, and makes a toast in front of his grave, with a chalice of cognac.