Poe: Once Upon a Midnight
1809 AD
1809 1809
71.05W42.25N
LIT

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
"Once upon a midnight dreary,
While I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore --
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door --
Only this and nothing more."

	In this stanza, the opening of his famous poem, "The Raven," American author Edgar Allan Poe develops the weird and morbid mood for which he is famous, and which was, perhaps, drawn from his own unhappy life.
	Poe was born in 1809 in Boston of parents who were both actors. When his father died, and then his mother, he was only three. He was adopted by John Allan, a tobacco merchant in Richmond, Virginia, and was given a good education. But he never got along well with his adopted father.
	At the University of Virginia, Poe gambled and lost more money than he had. Allan refused to pay his debts. Eventually Poe joined the army and attended West Point Military Academy, but was expelled. Allan disowned him.
	Poe's break came when he won $50 for his entry in a writing contest sponsored by the magazine "Saturday Visitor." His "MS. Found in Bottle" won first prize.
	That success led to jobs on various magazines, but none of them lasted very long. Apparently because of alcoholism he would either quit or be fired.
	In 1836 Poe married Virginia Clemm, and when she died in 1847 his health and alcoholism grew worse and he may have begun taking drugs. He wrote, "I became insane, with intervals of horrible sanity."
	Despite his anguished life, Poe wrote many successful stories, and pioneered detective fiction in "Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter." Like Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes (who came later), Poe's French detective Dupin made amazing logical deductions.
	Though an excellent detective writer, Poe is best remembered for his nightmarish stories of death, crime and horror. Some of these are: "Fall of the House of Usher," "Red Death," "Cask of Amontillado" and "Tell-Tale Heart."