Notes For October 9th, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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On October 9th, 1849, Annabel Lee, the classic final poem by the legendary American writer Edgar Allan Poe, was published. It was published posthumously by the New York Daily Tribune, just two days after his death.

Edgar Allan Poe, born in Boston in January of 1809, would become most famous as a master of the short story and the author of classic Gothic horror tales such as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Cask of Amontillado, The Black Cat, and The Fall of the House of Usher.

However, he began his literary career as a poet, wrote poetry prolifically, and became famous for classic poems such as The Conqueror Worm and The Raven. His last great poem was Annabel Lee.

Written in May of 1849 as Poe's life was falling apart and his health rapidly deteriorating, Annabel Lee was an ode to his great love, his young wife Virginia, who had succumbed to tuberculosis two years earlier at only 24.

Virginia, a cousin of Poe's, was thirteen when they first married, though they wouldn't share a bed until she was sixteen. They adored each other. Virginia often sat close to Poe while he wrote. She maintained his pens and prepared his manuscripts for mailing.

In a letter to a friend, Poe wrote of his Virginia, "I see no one among the living as beautiful as my little wife." When she contracted tuberculosis in 1847 at the age of nineteen, Poe was devastated.

Virginia turned to her husband for the strength to fight her illness. A year before her death, she wrote this poem:

Ever with thee I wish to roam —
Dearest my life is thine.
Give me a cottage for my home
And a rich old cypress vine,
Removed from the world with its sin and care
And the tattling of many tongues.
Love alone shall guide us when we are there —
Love shall heal my weakened lungs;
And Oh, the tranquil hours we'll spend,
Never wishing that others may see!
Perfect ease we'll enjoy, without thinking to lend
Ourselves to the world and its glee —
Ever peaceful and blissful we'll be.

Unfortunately, as Virginia's illness grew worse, Poe fell back into the alcoholism that had nearly destroyed him in the past. Her death devastated the man who had loved her so dearly.

A friend remarked:

The loss of his wife was a sad blow to [Poe.] He did not seem to care, after she was gone, whether he lived an hour, a day, a week or a year; she was his all.

Drowning in his grief for Virginia, Poe visited her grave often and drank heavily. The more he drank, the worse his mental state became. He tried in vain to move on, knowing that he really couldn't live without her.

He dated poet Sarah Helen Whitman, who lived in Providence, Rhode Island. Their engagement was called off as a result of Poe's drinking, his mental instability, and the interference of Sarah's mother, who did all she could to sabotage the relationship.

Poe returned to Richmond and resumed his relationship with his childhood sweetheart, Sarah Elmira Royster. He later returned to Baltimore, where he plunged into a quagmire of severe alcoholism and mental illness. He fell into financial ruin and disappeared.

Before his disappearance, Poe gave a manuscript to a friend of his. It was something he'd written a while back, a poem he described as a "little trifle that may be worth something to you." It was his completed manuscript of Annabel Lee.

On October 3rd, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe was found wandering the streets of Baltimore by a man named Joseph W. Walker. Severely ill, incoherent, and wearing someone else's clothes, Poe was taken to Washington College Hospital. He died four days later at the age of 40.

Poe's death certificate and medical records were lost in a fire, so the actual cause of his death remains a mystery. Newspapers reported that he died of "congestion of the brain" or "cerebral inflammation."

These were common euphemisms used when a person died of illicit causes such as alcoholism, drug addiction, or venereal disease. They were also used when the authorities wanted to keep the real cause of death quiet.

Some scholars and biographers have suggested that Poe may have been murdered for political reasons or may have contracted rabies, syphilis, meningitis, or another illness. Others theorize that he just drank himself to death out of grief, which, sadly, is the most likely case.

It has been theorized that Poe was a victim of cooping, a form of electoral fraud common in the 19th century. Cooping gangs would kidnap citizens off the street, ply them with alcohol, beat them, and force them to vote for a particular candidate (multiple times, using fake papers and disguises) under the threat of more violence or death.

Rufus Griswold, an enemy of Poe's who had published his work in the past, somehow became his literary executor. He wrote a biography of Poe called Memoir of the Author, where he described the writer as a depraved madman addled by drink and drugs.

Most of Griswold's claims were either outright lies or half-truths. For example, although Poe was an opium user and wrote about it, he was only a casual user and never became addicted to the drug.

Griswold's biography was virulently denounced by those who knew Edgar Allan Poe. The letters that Griswold presented as proof of his claims were later revealed to be forgeries.

Over a hundred years after Poe's death, his classic poem Annabel Lee would inspire the legendary Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov to write his classic novel, Lolita (1955).

The novel opens with protagonist and narrator Humbert Humbert recalling his great childhood love Annabel Leigh, (named after Poe's Annabel Lee) her sudden death from typhus, and the grief that would lead him down a path of depravity and self-destruction, ending in his death.

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Quote Of The Day

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"The death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world."

- Edgar Allan Poe

---

Vanguard Video

---

Today's video features a reading of Edgar Allan Poe's classic poem, Annabel Lee. Enjoy!

Notes For April 1st, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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On April 1st, 1841, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, the classic short story by the legendary American writer Edgar Allan Poe, was published. Appearing in Graham's Magazine, it's considered to be the first detective story.

It also incorporates elements of horror, as its author was famous for his horror fiction, which made up the bulk of his writings. Horror elements also appeared in his poems, such as the classics Annabel Lee and The Raven.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue opens with a bizarre and brutal double murder that took place in the Rue Morgue, a fictional street in Paris. The victims, Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter, were found dead in an inaccessible room that had been locked from the inside.

Madame L'Espanaye's throat was slashed so deeply that her head was nearly severed. Her daughter was strangled and stuffed in the chimney. Parisian detective C. Auguste Dupin and his unnamed friend, who narrates the story, read an account of the murders in the newspaper.

Dupin's interest in the case is piqued, especially when a man named Adolphe Le Bon is arrested for the horrible crime and imprisoned, despite the fact that there is no evidence to prove his guilt. Dupin offers his services to the prefect (chief) of police.

The plot thickens as Madame L'Espanaye's neighbors, who heard the murders take place, give contradictory statements, each claiming to have heard the killer speak a different foreign language - a language that none of them could recognize.

This leads Dupin to conclude that the witnesses weren't hearing a human voice. His theory is proven correct when he finds a hair at the crime scene that is not human. It belongs to an orangutan.

Dupin places an ad in the newspaper asking if anyone has lost an orangutan. A sailor shows up at his home to answer the ad. He had been keeping a pet orangutan he'd acquired in Borneo, but the animal escaped. Dupin interrogates the sailor and solves the crime.

When the orangutan escaped, it made off with the sailor's straight razor. When it got into Madame L'Espanaye's apartment, it attempted to shave her, mimicking its owner. The resulting bloodbath incited the orangutan to a frenzy.

It strangled Madame L'Espanaye's daughter, and, fearing its owner's whip, stuffed her body in the chimney to hide it. When the sailor learned of the "murders," he panicked and fled, allowing the orangutan to escape again.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue was a huge hit with both readers and critics. A review in the Pennsylvania Inquirer proclaimed that "it proves Mr. Poe to be a man of genius... with an inventive power and skill, of which we know no parallel."

Poe's detective, C. Auguste Dupin, would return in The Mystery of Marie Roget (1842), and The Purloined Letter (1844). The Murders in the Rue Morgue would be adapted several times for the radio, screen, and television.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue would also start a new subgenre - the locked room mystery. A locked room mystery involves a logically impossible crime, a crime where no evidence exists to prove that a crime was committed, or a crime where a person is convicted by evidence proving his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, but the sleuth doubts it and proves his innocence.

---

Quote Of The Day

---

"It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic."

- Edgar Allan Poe, from The Murders in the Rue Morgue

---

Vanguard Video

---

Today's video features a complete reading of Edgar Allan Poe's classic short story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Enjoy!

Notes For October 9th, 2025

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This Day In Literary History

---

On October 9th, 1849, Annabel Lee, the classic final poem by the legendary American writer Edgar Allan Poe, was published. It was published posthumously by the New York Daily Tribune, just two days after his death.

Edgar Allan Poe, born in Boston in January of 1809, would become most famous as a master of the short story and the author of classic Gothic horror tales such as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Cask of Amontillado, The Black Cat, and The Fall of the House of Usher.

However, he began his literary career as a poet, wrote poetry prolifically, and became famous for classic poems such as The Conqueror Worm and The Raven. His last great poem was Annabel Lee.

Written in May of 1849 as Poe's life was falling apart and his health rapidly deteriorating, Annabel Lee was an ode to his great love, his young wife Virginia, who had succumbed to tuberculosis two years earlier at only 24.

Virginia, a cousin of Poe's, was thirteen when they first married, though they wouldn't share a bed until she was sixteen. They adored each other. Virginia often sat close to Poe while he wrote. She maintained his pens and prepared his manuscripts for mailing.

In a letter to a friend, Poe wrote of his Virginia, "I see no one among the living as beautiful as my little wife." When she contracted tuberculosis in 1847 at the age of nineteen, Poe was devastated.

Virginia turned to her husband for the strength to fight her illness. A year before her death, she wrote this poem:

Ever with thee I wish to roam —
Dearest my life is thine.
Give me a cottage for my home
And a rich old cypress vine,
Removed from the world with its sin and care
And the tattling of many tongues.
Love alone shall guide us when we are there —
Love shall heal my weakened lungs;
And Oh, the tranquil hours we'll spend,
Never wishing that others may see!
Perfect ease we'll enjoy, without thinking to lend
Ourselves to the world and its glee —
Ever peaceful and blissful we'll be.

Unfortunately, as Virginia's illness grew worse, Poe fell back into the alcoholism that had nearly destroyed him in the past. Her death devastated the man who had loved her so dearly.

A friend remarked:

The loss of his wife was a sad blow to [Poe.] He did not seem to care, after she was gone, whether he lived an hour, a day, a week or a year; she was his all."

Drowning in his grief for Virginia, Poe visited her grave often and drank heavily. The more he drank, the worse his mental state became. He tried in vain to move on, knowing that he really couldn't live without her.

He dated poet Sarah Helen Whitman, who lived in Providence, Rhode Island. Their engagement was called off as a result of Poe's drinking, his mental instability, and the interference of Sarah's mother, who did all she could to sabotage the relationship.

Poe returned to Richmond and resumed his relationship with his childhood sweetheart, Sarah Elmira Royster. He later returned to Baltimore, where he plunged into a quagmire of severe alcoholism and mental illness. He fell into financial ruin and disappeared.

Before his disappearance, Poe gave a manuscript to a friend of his. It was something he'd written a while back, a poem he described as a "little trifle that may be worth something to you." It was his completed manuscript of Annabel Lee.

On October 3rd, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe was found wandering the streets of Baltimore by a man named Joseph W. Walker. Severely ill, incoherent, and wearing someone else's clothes, Poe was taken to Washington College Hospital. He died four days later at the age of 40.

Poe's death certificate and medical records were lost in a fire, so the actual cause of his death remains a mystery. Newspapers reported that he died of "congestion of the brain" or "cerebral inflammation."

These were common euphemisms used when a person died of illicit causes such as alcoholism, drug addiction, or venereal disease. They were also used when the authorities wanted to keep the real cause of death quiet.

Some scholars and biographers have suggested that Poe may have been murdered for political reasons or may have contracted rabies, syphilis, meningitis, or another illness. Others theorize that he just drank himself to death out of grief, which, sadly, is the most likely case.

It has been theorized that Poe was a victim of cooping, a form of electoral fraud common in the 19th century. Cooping gangs would kidnap citizens off the street, ply them with alcohol, beat them, and force them to vote for a particular candidate (multiple times, using fake papers and disguises) under the threat of more violence or death.

Rufus Griswold, an enemy of Poe's who had published his work in the past, somehow became his literary executor. He wrote a biography of Poe called Memoir of the Author, where he described the writer as a depraved madman addled by drink and drugs.

Most of Griswold's claims were either outright lies or half-truths. For example, although Poe was an opium user and wrote about it, he was only a casual user and never became addicted to the drug.

Griswold's biography was virulently denounced by those who knew Edgar Allan Poe. The letters that Griswold presented as proof of his claims were later revealed to be forgeries.

Over a hundred years after Poe's death, his classic poem Annabel Lee would inspire the legendary Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov to write his classic novel, Lolita (1955).

The novel opens with protagonist and narrator Humbert Humbert recalling his great childhood love Annabel Leigh, (named after Poe's Annabel Lee) her sudden death from typhus, and the grief that would lead him down a path of self-destruction, ending in his death.

---

Quote Of The Day

---

"The death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world."

- Edgar Allan Poe

---

Vanguard Video

---

Today's video features a reading of Edgar Allan Poe's classic poem, Annabel Lee. Enjoy!

Notes For April 1st, 2025

---

This Day In Literary History

---

On April 1st, 1841, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, the classic short story by the legendary American writer Edgar Allan Poe, was published. Appearing in Graham's Magazine, it's considered to be the first detective story.

It also incorporates elements of horror, as its author was famous for his horror fiction, which made up the bulk of his writings. Horror elements also appeared in his poems, such as the classics Annabel Lee and The Raven.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue opens with a bizarre and brutal double murder that took place in the Rue Morgue, a fictional street in Paris. The victims, Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter, were found dead in an inaccessible room that had been locked from the inside.

Madame L'Espanaye's throat was slashed so deeply that her head was nearly severed. Her daughter was strangled and stuffed in the chimney. Parisian detective C. Auguste Dupin and his unnamed friend, who narrates the story, read an account of the murders in the newspaper.

Dupin's interest in the case is piqued, especially when a man named Adolphe Le Bon is arrested for the horrible crime and imprisoned, despite the fact that there is no evidence to prove his guilt. Dupin offers his services to the prefect (chief) of police.

The plot thickens as Madame L'Espanaye's neighbors, who heard the murders take place, give contradictory statements, each claiming to have heard the killer speak a different foreign language - a language that none of them could recognize.

This leads Dupin to conclude that the witnesses weren't hearing a human voice. His theory is proven correct when he finds a hair at the crime scene that is not human. It belongs to an orangutan.

Dupin places an ad in the newspaper asking if anyone has lost an orangutan. A sailor shows up at his home to answer the ad. He had been keeping a pet orangutan he'd acquired in Borneo, but the animal escaped. Dupin interrogates the sailor and solves the crime.

When the orangutan escaped, it made off with the sailor's straight razor. When it got into Madame L'Espanaye's apartment, it attempted to shave her, mimicking its owner. The resulting bloodbath incited the orangutan to a frenzy.

It strangled Madame L'Espanaye's daughter, and, fearing its owner's whip, stuffed her body in the chimney to hide it. When the sailor learned of the "murders," he panicked and fled, allowing the orangutan to escape again.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue was a huge hit with both readers and critics. A review in the Pennsylvania Inquirer proclaimed that "it proves Mr. Poe to be a man of genius... with an inventive power and skill, of which we know no parallel."

Poe's detective, C. Auguste Dupin, would return in The Mystery of Marie Roget (1842), and The Purloined Letter (1844). The Murders in the Rue Morgue would be adapted several times for the radio, screen, and television.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue would also start a new subgenre - the locked room mystery. A locked room mystery involves a logically impossible crime, a crime where no evidence exists to prove that a crime was committed, or a crime where a person is convicted by evidence proving his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, but the sleuth doubts it and proves his innocence.

---

Quote Of The Day

---

"It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic."

- Edgar Allan Poe, from The Murders in the Rue Morgue

---

Vanguard Video

---

Today's video features a complete reading of Edgar Allan Poe's classic short story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Enjoy!

Notes For October 9th, 2024

---

This Day In Literary History

---

On October 9th, 1849, Annabel Lee, the classic final poem by the legendary American writer Edgar Allan Poe, was published. It was published posthumously by the New York Daily Tribune, just two days after his death.

Edgar Allan Poe, born in Boston in January of 1809, would become most famous as a master of the short story and the author of classic Gothic horror tales such as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Cask of Amontillado, The Black Cat, and The Fall of the House of Usher.

However, he began his literary career as a poet, wrote poetry prolifically, and became famous for classic poems such as The Conqueror Worm and The Raven. His last great poem was Annabel Lee.

Written in May of 1849 as Poe's life was falling apart and his health rapidly deteriorating, Annabel Lee was an ode to his great love, his young wife Virginia, who had succumbed to tuberculosis two years earlier at only 24.

Virginia, a cousin of Poe's, was thirteen when they first married, though they wouldn't share a bed until she was sixteen. They adored each other. Virginia often sat close to Poe while he wrote. She maintained his pens and prepared his manuscripts for mailing.

In a letter to a friend, Poe wrote of his Virginia, "I see no one among the living as beautiful as my little wife." When she contracted tuberculosis in 1847 at the age of nineteen, Poe was devastated.

Virginia turned to her husband for the strength to fight her illness. A year before her death, she wrote this poem:

Ever with thee I wish to roam —
Dearest my life is thine.
Give me a cottage for my home
And a rich old cypress vine,
Removed from the world with its sin and care
And the tattling of many tongues.
Love alone shall guide us when we are there —
Love shall heal my weakened lungs;
And Oh, the tranquil hours we'll spend,
Never wishing that others may see!
Perfect ease we'll enjoy, without thinking to lend
Ourselves to the world and its glee —
Ever peaceful and blissful we'll be.

Unfortunately, as Virginia's illness grew worse, Poe fell back into the alcoholism that had nearly destroyed him in the past. Her death devastated the man who had loved her so dearly.

A friend remarked that "the loss of his wife was a sad blow to [Poe.] He did not seem to care, after she was gone, whether he lived an hour, a day, a week or a year; she was his all."

Drowning in his grief for Virginia, Poe visited her grave often and drank heavily. The more he drank, the worse his mental state became. He tried in vain to move on, knowing that he really couldn't live without her.

He dated poet Sarah Helen Whitman, who lived in Providence, Rhode Island. Their engagement was called off as a result of Poe's drinking, his mental instability, and the interference of Sarah's mother, who did all she could to sabotage the relationship.

Poe returned to Richmond and resumed his relationship with his childhood sweetheart, Sarah Elmira Royster. He later returned to Baltimore, where he plunged into a quagmire of severe alcoholism and mental illness. He fell into financial ruin and disappeared.

Before his disappearance, Poe gave a manuscript to a friend of his. It was something he'd written a while back, a poem he described as a "little trifle that may be worth something to you." It was his completed manuscript of Annabel Lee.

On October 3rd, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe was found wandering the streets of Baltimore by a man named Joseph W. Walker. Severely ill, incoherent, and wearing someone else's clothes, Poe was taken to Washington College Hospital. He died four days later at the age of 40.

Poe's death certificate and medical records were lost in a fire, so the actual cause of his death remains a mystery. Newspapers reported that he died of "congestion of the brain" or "cerebral inflammation."

These were common euphemisms used when a person died of illicit causes such as alcoholism, drug addiction, or venereal disease. They were also used when the authorities wanted to keep the real cause of death quiet.

Some scholars and biographers have suggested that Poe may have been murdered for political reasons or may have contracted rabies, syphilis, meningitis, or another illness. Others theorize that he just drank himself to death out of grief, which, sadly, is the most likely case.

It has been theorized that Poe was a victim of cooping, a form of electoral fraud common in the 19th century. Cooping gangs would kidnap citizens off the street, ply them with alcohol, beat them, and force them to vote for a particular candidate (multiple times, using fake papers) under the threat of more violence or death.

Rufus Griswold, an enemy of Poe's who had published his work in the past, somehow became his literary executor. He wrote a biography of Poe called Memoir of the Author, where he described the writer as a depraved madman addled by drink and drugs.

Most of Griswold's claims were either outright lies or half-truths. For example, although Poe was an opium user and wrote about it, he was only a casual user and never became addicted to the drug.

Griswold's biography was virulently denounced by those who knew Edgar Allan Poe. The letters that Griswold presented as proof of his claims were later revealed to be forgeries.

Over a hundred years after Poe's death, his classic poem Annabel Lee would inspire the legendary Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov to write his classic novel, Lolita (1955).

The novel opens with protagonist and narrator Humbert Humbert recalling his great childhood love Annabel Leigh, (named after Poe's Annabel Lee) her sudden death from typhus, and the grief that would lead him down a path of self-destruction, ending in his death.

---

Quote Of The Day

---

"The death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world."

- Edgar Allan Poe

---

Vanguard Video

---

Today's video features a reading of Edgar Allan Poe's classic poem, Annabel Lee. Enjoy!

Notes For January 19th, 2024

---

This Day In Literary History

---

On January 19th, 1809, the legendary American writer Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His parents, Henry Leonard Poe and Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe, were both actors.

At the time of his birth, they were in a production of Shakespeare's King Lear, and Edgar may have been named after the character in the play.

When Edgar was a year old, his father abandoned the family. A year later, his mother died of tuberculosis. He was adopted by Scottish merchant John Allan, who changed his name to Edgar Allan Poe and had him baptized in the Episcopal Church.

As a parent, John Allan proved to be a man of extremes; he was both an incredibly doting father and a ferociously strict and aggressive disciplinarian. In 1815, the Allans sailed to England.

At six, Poe briefly attended a grammar school in his adoptive father's hometown of Irvine, Scotland. By 1816, he rejoined his family in London, where he attended a boarding school in Chelsea until 1817.

By 1820, Poe and his family had moved back to the United States, settling in Richmond, Virginia. In 1824, Poe, then fifteen years old, served as a lieutenant in the Richmond youth honor guard during the celebrated visit of the Marquis de Lafayette.

Two years later, Poe enrolled at the University of Virginia, where he majored in languages. The university had been founded a year earlier by Thomas Jefferson.

The experimental college had strict rules against such things as tobacco, alcohol, and gambling, yet it also employed an honor system of student self-government.

Poe found the system chaotic and dysfunctional, adding to the stress he was already under; his engagement to his childhood sweetheart Sarah Elmira Royster was called off, and he became estranged from his father after his gambling debts cut into his college finances.

A year later, still struggling to pay for his education and unhappy with the honor system, he left university. After he learned that Sarah had married another man, Poe believed there was nothing left for him in Richmond.

So, in 1827, he moved to Boston, where he worked as a clerk and a newspaper writer. He began writing poetry and fiction under the pseudonym Henri Le Rennet.

In May of 1827, unable to support himself, Poe enlisted as a private in the U.S. Army, using the alias Edgar A. Perry. He claimed he was 22 years old, though he was really 18. He was stationed at Fort Independence in Boston Harbor and earned $5 a month.

That same year, his first book was published. It was a poetry collection titled Tamerlane and Other Poems. The byline read "by a Bostonian." Only 50 copies of the book were printed, and it went practically unnoticed.

Poe's regiment was posted to Fort Moultrie in Charleston, South Carolina, where he won a promotion and his monthly pay was doubled. After serving for two years, he was promoted to Sergeant Major for Artillery.

Then he decided that he wanted to end his five-year enlistment early and enter the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He revealed his real name and age to his commanding officer, Lieutenant Howard.

Howard would only discharge him if he agreed to reconcile with his adoptive father, John Allan. He wrote to John repeatedly, but received no reply. When he visited him in February of 1829, Poe found that his father hadn't even bothered to tell him that his mother had died.

Despite this, Poe and his father did reconcile, and John Allan supported his decision to leave the Army. Before entering West Point, Poe moved to Baltimore to stay with his widowed aunt Maria, her daughter Virginia, his brother Henry, and his grandmother, Elizabeth Cairnes Poe.

His second poetry collection, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems was published. In October of 1830, Poe's father remarried. Poe disapproved of both the marriage and the illegitimate children sired as the result of John Allan's philandering.

This led to bitter quarrels between the two men, and Poe's father disowned him. Poe left West Point by deliberately getting himself court martialed. In February of 1831, he moved to New York City.

There, he released his third poetry collection, Poems. The book was financed in part by Poe's fellow West Point cadets, who loved the satirical poems he wrote that made fun of their commanding officers.

In Poe's third book, his long poems Tamerlane and Al Aaraaf were included again. The book also featured early versions of To Helen, Israfel, and The City In The Sea.

A month after he arrived in New York, Poe returned to Baltimore to stay with his aunt, cousin, and brother. His older brother Henry died five months later from complications due to alcoholism. Afterward, Poe decided to try and make a living as a writer.

Unfortunately, copyright laws were practically nonexistent in the early 19th century, and pirated editions of literary works were common. Undaunted, Poe put his poetry on the back burner and turned to prose. He sold a few short stories and began work on his only play, Politian.

In 1833, Poe's short story MS. Found In A Bottle won him a prize from the Baltimore Saturday Visiter. It also brought him to the attention of John P. Kennedy, a novelist and prominent Baltimorian.

Kennedy helped him sell some more stories and land a job as assistant editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond in August of 1835. He was fired a few weeks later for being drunk on the job.

Poe returned to Baltimore, where he secretly married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia. After he promised to behave, Poe was reinstated at the Messenger. He and Virginia and her mother moved to Richmond. Poe and Virginia later had a second, public wedding ceremony.

By 1838, Poe's only complete novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, was published. It was widely reviewed and praised. In the summer of 1839, Poe became the assistant editor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine.

There, he published numerous short stories, reviews, and articles, building his reputation as both a writer and a critic. That same year, his classic short story collection, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, was published in two volumes.

Regarded today as one of the all time great works of American literature, the collection received mixed reviews and he made little money from it. In 1840, Poe became assistant editor of Graham's Magazine.

He made plans to start his own literary magazine, The Stylus, but his plans fell through. Two years later, his wife Virginia was stricken with tuberculosis. As her illness worsened, he began drinking heavily.

He left Graham's and returned to New York, where he worked for the Evening Mirror, which would publish his celebrated poem, The Raven, in January of 1845.

Poe was paid only $9 for it, but the poem became a huge hit and made him a household name. Children would follow him as he walked down the street, and he would caw "Nevermore!" at them. They would scream and pretend to run away, then laugh and follow him until he cawed "Nevermore!" at them again.

Poe later become editor and then owner of The Broadway Journal. Still drinking, Poe would alienate himself from his fellow writers when he publicly accused poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of plagiarism. Longfellow never responded to the charge.

After The Broadway Journal failed, Poe moved into a cottage in The Bronx, which is known today as Poe Cottage. Not long after he moved in, his wife Virginia died of tuberculosis. Poe was devastated and plunged into a quagmire of alcoholism and mental illness.

Later, he dated poet Sarah Helen Whitman, who lived in Providence, Rhode Island. Their engagement was called off as a result of Poe's drinking, his mental instability, and the interference of Sarah's mother, who did all she could to sabotage the relationship.

Poe returned to Richmond and resumed his relationship with his childhood sweetheart, Sarah Elmira Royster. He returned to Baltimore, then mysteriously disappeared. On October 3rd, 1849, he was found wandering the streets of Baltimore by a man named Joseph W. Walker.

Severely ill, incoherent, and wearing someone else's clothes, Edgar Allan Poe was taken to Washington College Hospital, where he died four days later at the age of 40. His death certificate and medical records were lost, so the actual cause of his death remains a mystery.

Newspapers reported that Poe died of "congestion of the brain" or "cerebral inflammation," which were common euphemisms used when a person died of illicit causes such as alcoholism, drug addiction, or venereal disease.

Though most believe that he likely died of alcoholism, theories suggest that he might have died of a non-illicit illness such as meningitis, cholera, or rabies. He may have also been murdered; he supposedly called out the name Reynolds several times before dying.

Another credible theory is that he'd been the victim of cooping, a form of electoral fraud common at the time where a gang of hired thugs kidnap someone, beat him savagely, ply him with alcohol, then force him to wear disguises and vote repeatedly for a particular candidate under the threat of more beatings or murder.

Before his disappearance, Poe had given a manuscript to a friend of his. It was something he'd written a while back, a poem he described as "a little trifle that may be worth something to you." It was the manuscript for his last great poem, Annabel Lee, which would be published two days after he died.

Rufus Griswold, an enemy of Poe's, somehow became his literary executor. He wrote a biography of Poe called Memoir of the Author, where he described Poe as a depraved madman addled by drink and drugs.

Most of Griswold's claims were lies or half-truths; for example, although Poe was an opium user and wrote about it, he was only a casual user and never became addicted to the drug.

Griswold's biography was virulently denounced by those who knew Edgar Allan Poe. The letters that Griswold presented as proof of his claims were later revealed to be forgeries.

Edgar Allan Poe's writings, especially his classic horror stories such as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat, The Cask Of Amontillado, and The Fall of the House of Usher continue to inspire new generations of writers.

---

Quote Of The Day

---

"Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality."

- Edgar Allan Poe

---

Vanguard Video

---

Today's video features a complete reading of Edgar Allan Poe's classic short story, The Fall of the House of Usher - performed by Christopher Lee! Enjoy!

Notes For January 19th, 2023

---

This Day In Literary History

---

On January 19th, 1809, the legendary American writer Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His parents, Henry Leonard Poe and Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe, were both actors.

At the time of his birth, they were in a production of Shakespeare's King Lear, and Edgar may have been named after the character in the play.

When Edgar was a year old, his father abandoned the family. A year later, his mother died of tuberculosis. He was adopted by Scottish merchant John Allan, who changed his name to Edgar Allan Poe and had him baptized in the Episcopal Church.

As a parent, John Allan proved to be a man of extremes; he was both an incredibly doting father and a ferociously strict and aggressive disciplinarian. In 1815, the Allans sailed to England.

At six, Poe briefly attended a grammar school in his adoptive father's hometown of Irvine, Scotland. By 1816, he rejoined his family in London, where he attended a boarding school in Chelsea until 1817.

By 1820, Poe and his family had moved back to the United States, settling in Richmond, Virginia. In 1824, Poe, then fifteen years old, served as a lieutenant in the Richmond youth honor guard during the celebrated visit of the Marquis de Lafayette.

Two years later, Poe enrolled at the University of Virginia, where he majored in languages. The university had been founded a year earlier by Thomas Jefferson.

The experimental college had strict rules against such things as tobacco, alcohol, and gambling, yet it also employed an honor system of student self-government.

Poe found the system chaotic and dysfunctional, adding to the stress he was already under; his engagement to his childhood sweetheart Sarah Elmira Royster was called off, and he became estranged from his father after his gambling debts cut into his college finances.

A year later, still struggling to pay for his education and unhappy with the honor system, he left university. After he learned that Sarah had married another man, Poe believed there was nothing left for him in Richmond.

So, in 1827, he moved to Boston, where he worked as a clerk and a newspaper writer. He began writing poetry and fiction under the pseudonym Henri Le Rennet.

In May of 1827, unable to support himself, Poe enlisted as a private in the U.S. Army, using the alias Edgar A. Perry. He claimed he was 22 years old, though he was really 18. He was stationed at Fort Independence in Boston Harbor and earned $5 a month.

That same year, his first book was published. It was a poetry collection titled Tamerlane and Other Poems. The byline read "by a Bostonian." Only 50 copies of the book were printed, and it went practically unnoticed.

Poe's regiment was posted to Fort Moultrie in Charleston, South Carolina, where he won a promotion and his monthly pay was doubled. After serving for two years, he was promoted to Sergeant Major for Artillery.

Then he decided that he wanted to end his five-year enlistment early and enter the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He revealed his real name and age to his commanding officer, Lieutenant Howard.

Howard would only discharge him if he agreed to reconcile with his adoptive father, John Allan. He wrote to John repeatedly, but received no reply. When he visited him in February of 1829, Poe found that his father hadn't even bothered to tell him that his mother had died.

Despite this, Poe and his father did reconcile, and John Allan supported his decision to leave the Army. Before entering West Point, Poe moved to Baltimore to stay with his widowed aunt Maria, her daughter Virginia, his brother Henry, and his grandmother, Elizabeth Cairnes Poe.

His second poetry collection, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems was published. In October of 1830, Poe's father remarried. Poe disapproved of both the marriage and the illegitimate children sired as the result of John Allan's philandering.

This led to bitter quarrels between the two men, and Poe's father disowned him. Poe left West Point by deliberately getting himself court martialed. In February of 1831, he moved to New York City.

There, he released his third poetry collection, Poems. The book was financed in part by Poe's fellow West Point cadets, who loved the satirical poems he wrote that made fun of their commanding officers.

In Poe's third book, his long poems Tamerlane and Al Aaraaf were included again. The book also featured early versions of To Helen, Israfel, and The City In The Sea.

A month after he arrived in New York, Poe returned to Baltimore to stay with his aunt, cousin, and brother. His older brother Henry died five months later from complications due to alcoholism. Afterward, Poe decided to try and make a living as a writer.

Unfortunately, copyright laws were practically nonexistent in the early 19th century, and pirated editions of literary works were common. Undaunted, Poe put his poetry on the back burner and turned to prose. He sold a few short stories and began work on his only play, Politian.

In 1833, Poe's short story MS. Found In A Bottle won him a prize from the Baltimore Saturday Visiter. It also brought him to the attention of John P. Kennedy, a novelist and prominent Baltimorian.

Kennedy helped him sell some more stories and land a job as assistant editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond in August of 1835. He was fired a few weeks later for being drunk on the job.

Poe returned to Baltimore, where he secretly married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia. After he promised to behave, Poe was reinstated at the Messenger. He and Virginia and her mother moved to Richmond. Poe and Virginia later had a second, public wedding ceremony.

By 1838, Poe's only complete novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, was published. It was widely reviewed and praised. In the summer of 1839, Poe became the assistant editor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine.

There, he published numerous short stories, reviews, and articles, building his reputation as both a writer and a critic. That same year, his classic short story collection, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, was published in two volumes.

Regarded today as one of the all time great works of American literature, the collection received mixed reviews and he made little money from it. In 1840, Poe became assistant editor of Graham's Magazine.

He made plans to start his own literary magazine, The Stylus, but his plans fell through. Two years later, his wife Virginia was stricken with tuberculosis. As her illness worsened, he began drinking heavily.

He left Graham's and returned to New York, where he worked for the Evening Mirror, which would publish his celebrated poem, The Raven, in January of 1845.

Poe was paid only $9 for it, but the poem became a huge hit and made him a household name. Children would follow him as he walked down the street, and he would caw "Nevermore!" at them. They would scream and pretend to run away, then laugh and follow him until he cawed "Nevermore!" at them again.

Poe later become editor and then owner of The Broadway Journal. Still drinking, Poe would alienate himself from his fellow writers when he publicly accused poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of plagiarism. Longfellow never responded to the charge.

After The Broadway Journal failed, Poe moved into a cottage in The Bronx, which is known today as Poe Cottage. Not long after he moved in, his wife Virginia died of tuberculosis. Poe was devastated and plunged into a quagmire of alcoholism and mental illness.

Later, he dated poet Sarah Helen Whitman, who lived in Providence, Rhode Island. Their engagement was called off as a result of Poe's drinking, his mental instability, and the interference of Sarah's mother, who did all she could to sabotage the relationship.

Poe returned to Richmond and resumed his relationship with his childhood sweetheart, Sarah Elmira Royster. He returned to Baltimore, then mysteriously disappeared. On October 3rd, 1849, he was found wandering the streets of Baltimore by a man named Joseph W. Walker.

Severely ill, incoherent, and wearing someone else's clothes, Edgar Allan Poe was taken to Washington College Hospital, where he died four days later at the age of 40. His death certificate and medical records were lost, so the actual cause of his death remains a mystery.

Newspapers reported that he died of "congestion of the brain" or "cerebral inflammation," which were common euphemisms used when a person died of illicit causes such as alcoholism, drug addiction, or venereal disease.

Before his disappearance, Poe had given a manuscript to a friend of his. It was something he'd written a while back, a poem he described as "a little trifle that may be worth something to you." It was the manuscript for his last great poem, Annabel Lee, which would be published two days after he died.

Rufus Griswold, an enemy of Poe's, somehow became his literary executor. He wrote a biography of Poe called Memoir of the Author, where he described Poe as a depraved madman addled by drink and drugs.

Most of Griswold's claims were lies or half-truths; for example, although Poe was an opium user and wrote about it, he was only a casual user and never became addicted to the drug.

Griswold's biography was virulently denounced by those who knew Edgar Allan Poe. The letters that Griswold presented as proof of his claims were later revealed to be forgeries.

Edgar Allan Poe's writings, especially his classic horror stories such as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat, The Cask Of Amontillado, and The Fall of the House of Usher continue to inspire new generations of writers.

---

Quote Of The Day

---

"Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality." - Edgar Allan Poe

---

Vanguard Video

---

Today's video features a complete reading of Edgar Allan Poe's classic short story, The Fall of the House of Usher - performed by Christopher Lee! Enjoy!

Notes For April 1st, 2022

---

This Day In Literary History

---

On April 1st, 1841, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, the classic short story by the legendary American writer Edgar Allan Poe, was published. Appearing in Graham's Magazine, it's considered to be the first detective story.

It also incorporates elements of horror, as its author was famous for his horror fiction, which made up the bulk of his writings. Horror elements also appeared in his poems, such as the classics Annabel Lee and The Raven.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue opens with a bizarre and brutal double murder that took place in the Rue Morgue, a fictional street in Paris. The victims, Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter, were found dead in an inaccessible room that had been locked from the inside.

Madame L'Espanaye's throat was slashed so deeply that her head was nearly severed. Her daughter was strangled and stuffed in the chimney. Parisian detective C. Auguste Dupin and his unnamed friend, who narrates the story, read an account of the murders in the newspaper.

Dupin's interest in the case is piqued, especially when a man named Adolphe Le Bon is arrested for the horrible crime and imprisoned, despite the fact that there is no evidence to prove his guilt. Dupin offers his services to the prefect (chief) of police.

The plot thickens as Madame L'Espanaye's neighbors, who heard the murders take place, give contradictory statements, each claiming to have heard the killer speak a different foreign language - a language that none of them could recognize.

This leads Dupin to conclude that the witnesses weren't hearing a human voice. His theory is proven correct when he finds a hair at the crime scene that is not human. It belongs to an orangutan.

Dupin places an ad in the newspaper asking if anyone has lost an orangutan. A sailor shows up at his home to answer the ad. He had been keeping a pet orangutan he'd acquired in Borneo, but the animal escaped. Dupin interrogates the sailor and solves the crime.

When the orangutan escaped, it made off with the sailor's straight razor. When it got into Madame L'Espanaye's apartment, it attempted to shave her, mimicking its owner. The resulting bloodbath incited the orangutan to a frenzy.

It strangled Madame L'Espanaye's daughter, and, fearing its owner's whip, stuffed her body in the chimney to hide it. When the sailor learned of the "murders," he panicked and fled, allowing the orangutan to escape again.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue was a huge hit with both readers and critics. A review in the Pennsylvania Inquirer proclaimed that "it proves Mr. Poe to be a man of genius... with an inventive power and skill, of which we know no parallel."

Poe's detective, C. Auguste Dupin, would return in The Mystery of Marie Roget (1842), and The Purloined Letter (1844). The Murders in the Rue Morgue would be adapted several times for the radio, screen, and television.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue would also start a new subgenre - the locked room mystery. A locked room mystery involves a logically impossible crime, a crime where no evidence exists to prove that a crime was committed, or a crime where a person is convicted by evidence proving his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, but the sleuth doubts it and proves his innocence.

---

Quote Of The Day

---

"It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic." - Edgar Allan Poe, from The Murders in the Rue Morgue

---

Vanguard Video

---

Today's video features a complete reading of Edgar Allan Poe's classic short story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Enjoy!

Notes For January 19th, 2022

---

This Day In Literary History

---

On January 19th, 1809, the legendary American writer Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His parents, Henry Leonard Poe and Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe, were both actors.

At the time of his birth, they were in a production of Shakespeare's King Lear, and Edgar may have been named after the character in the play.

When Edgar was a year old, his father abandoned the family. A year later, his mother died of tuberculosis. He was adopted by Scottish merchant John Allan, who changed his name to Edgar Allan Poe and had him baptized in the Episcopal Church.

As a parent, John Allan proved to be a man of extremes; he was both an incredibly doting father and a ferociously strict and aggressive disciplinarian. In 1815, the Allans sailed to England.

At six, Poe briefly attended a grammar school in his adoptive father's hometown of Irvine, Scotland. By 1816, he rejoined his family in London, where he attended a boarding school in Chelsea until 1817.

By 1820, Poe and his family had moved back to the United States, settling in Richmond, Virginia. In 1824, Poe, then fifteen years old, served as a lieutenant in the Richmond youth honor guard during the celebrated visit of the Marquis de Lafayette.

Two years later, Poe enrolled at the University of Virginia, where he majored in languages. The university had been founded a year earlier by Thomas Jefferson.

The experimental college had strict rules against such things as tobacco, alcohol, and gambling, yet it also employed an honor system of student self-government.

Poe found the system chaotic and dysfunctional, adding to the stress he was already under; his engagement to his childhood sweetheart Sarah Elmira Royster was called off, and he became estranged from his father after his gambling debts cut into his college finances.

A year later, still struggling to pay for his education and unhappy with the honor system, he left university. After he learned that Sarah had married another man, Poe believed there was nothing left for him in Richmond.

So, in 1827, he moved to Boston, where he worked as a clerk and a newspaper writer. He began writing poetry and fiction under the pseudonym Henri Le Rennet.

In May of 1827, unable to support himself, Poe enlisted as a private in the U.S. Army, using the alias Edgar A. Perry. He claimed he was 22 years old, though he was really 18. He was stationed at Fort Independence in Boston Harbor and earned $5 a month.

That same year, his first book was published. It was a poetry collection titled Tamerlane and Other Poems. The byline read "by a Bostonian." Only 50 copies of the book were printed, and it went practically unnoticed.

Poe's regiment was posted to Fort Moultrie in Charleston, South Carolina, where he won a promotion and his monthly pay was doubled. After serving for two years, he was promoted to Sergeant Major for Artillery.

Then he decided that he wanted to end his five-year enlistment early and enter the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He revealed his real name and age to his commanding officer, Lieutenant Howard.

Howard would only discharge him if he agreed to reconcile with his adoptive father, John Allan. He wrote to John repeatedly, but received no reply. When he visited him in February of 1829, Poe found that his father hadn't even bothered to tell him that his mother had died.

Despite this, Poe and his father did reconcile, and John Allan supported his decision to leave the Army. Before entering West Point, Poe moved to Baltimore to stay with his widowed aunt Maria, her daughter Virginia, his brother Henry, and his grandmother, Elizabeth Cairnes Poe.

His second poetry collection, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems was published. In October of 1830, Poe's father remarried. Poe disapproved of both the marriage and the illegitimate children sired as the result of John Allan's philandering.

This led to bitter quarrels between the two men, and Poe's father disowned him. Poe left West Point by deliberately getting himself court martialed. In February of 1831, he moved to New York City.

There, he released his third poetry collection, Poems. The book was financed in part by Poe's fellow West Point cadets, who loved the satirical poems he wrote that made fun of their commanding officers.

In Poe's third book, his long poems Tamerlane and Al Aaraaf were included again. The book also featured early versions of To Helen, Israfel, and The City In The Sea.

A month after he arrived in New York, Poe returned to Baltimore to stay with his aunt, cousin, and brother. His older brother Henry died five months later from complications due to alcoholism. Afterward, Poe decided to try and make a living as a writer.

Unfortunately, copyright laws were practically nonexistent in the early 19th century, and pirated editions of literary works were common. Undaunted, Poe put his poetry on the back burner and turned to prose. He sold a few short stories and began work on his only play, Politian.

In 1833, Poe's short story MS. Found In A Bottle won him a prize from the Baltimore Saturday Visiter. It also brought him to the attention of John P. Kennedy, a novelist and prominent Baltimorian.

Kennedy helped him sell some more stories and land a job as assistant editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond in August of 1835. He was fired a few weeks later for being drunk on the job.

Poe returned to Baltimore, where he secretly married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia. After he promised to behave, Poe was reinstated at the Messenger. He and Virginia and her mother moved to Richmond. Poe and Virginia later had a second, public wedding ceremony.

By 1838, Poe's only complete novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, was published. It was widely reviewed and praised. In the summer of 1839, Poe became the assistant editor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine.

There, he published numerous short stories, reviews, and articles, building his reputation as both a writer and a critic. That same year, his classic short story collection, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, was published in two volumes.

Regarded today as one of the all time great works of American literature, the collection received mixed reviews and he made little money from it. In 1840, Poe became assistant editor of Graham's Magazine.

He made plans to start his own literary magazine, The Stylus, but his plans fell through. Two years later, his wife Virginia was stricken with tuberculosis. As her illness worsened, he began drinking heavily.

He left Graham's and returned to New York, where he worked for the Evening Mirror, which would publish his celebrated poem, The Raven, in January of 1845.

Poe was paid only $9 for it, but the poem became a huge hit and made him a household name. Children would follow him as he walked down the street, and he would caw "Nevermore!" at them. They would scream and pretend to run away, then laugh and follow him until he cawed "Nevermore!" at them again.

Poe later become editor and then owner of The Broadway Journal. Still drinking, Poe would alienate himself from his fellow writers when he publicly accused poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of plagiarism. Longfellow never responded to the charge.

After The Broadway Journal failed, Poe moved into a cottage in The Bronx, which is known today as Poe Cottage. Not long after he moved in, his wife Virginia died of tuberculosis. Poe was devastated and plunged into a quagmire of alcoholism and mental illness.

Later, he dated poet Sarah Helen Whitman, who lived in Providence, Rhode Island. Their engagement was called off as a result of Poe's drinking, his mental instability, and the interference of Sarah's mother, who did all she could to sabotage the relationship.

Poe returned to Richmond and resumed his relationship with his childhood sweetheart, Sarah Elmira Royster. He returned to Baltimore, then mysteriously disappeared. On October 3rd, 1849, he was found wandering the streets of Baltimore by a man named Joseph W. Walker.

Severely ill, incoherent, and wearing someone else's clothes, Edgar Allan Poe was taken to Washington College Hospital, where he died four days later at the age of 40. His death certificate and medical records were lost, so the actual cause of his death remains a mystery.

Newspapers reported that he died of "congestion of the brain" or "cerebral inflammation," which were common euphemisms used when a person died of illicit causes such as alcoholism, drug addiction, or venereal disease.

Before his disappearance, Poe had given a manuscript to a friend of his. It was something he'd written a while back, a poem he described as "a little trifle that may be worth something to you." It was the manuscript for his last great poem, Annabel Lee, which would be published two days after he died.

Rufus Griswold, an enemy of Poe's, somehow became his literary executor. He wrote a biography of Poe called Memoir of the Author, where he described Poe as a depraved madman addled by drink and drugs.

Most of Griswold's claims were lies or half-truths; for example, although Poe was an opium user and wrote about it, he was a casual user and never became addicted to the drug.

Griswold's biography was virulently denounced by those who knew Edgar Allan Poe. The letters that Griswold presented as proof of his claims were later revealed to be forgeries.

Edgar Allan Poe's writings, especially his classic horror stories such as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat, The Cask Of Amontillado, and The Fall of the House of Usher continue to inspire new generations of writers.

---

Quote Of The Day

---

"Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality." - Edgar Allan Poe

---

Vanguard Video

---

Today's video features a complete reading of Edgar Allan Poe's classic short story, The Fall of the House of Usher - performed by Christopher Lee! Enjoy!

Notes For April 1st, 2021

---

This Day In Literary History

---

On April 1st, 1841, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, the classic short story by the legendary American writer Edgar Allan Poe, was published. Appearing in Graham's Magazine, it's considered to be the first detective story.

It also incorporates elements of horror, as its author was famous for his horror fiction, which made up the bulk of his writings. Horror elements also appeared in his poems, such as the classics Annabel Lee and The Raven.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue opens with a bizarre and brutal double murder that took place in the Rue Morgue, a fictional street in Paris. The victims, Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter, were found dead in an inaccessible room that had been locked from the inside.

Madame L'Espanaye's throat was slashed so deeply that her head was nearly severed. Her daughter was strangled and stuffed in the chimney. Parisian detective C. Auguste Dupin and his unnamed friend, who narrates the story, read an account of the murders in the newspaper.

Dupin's interest in the case is piqued, especially when a man named Adolphe Le Bon is arrested for the horrible crime and imprisoned, despite the fact that there is no evidence to prove his guilt. Dupin offers his services to the prefect (chief) of police.

The plot thickens as Madame L'Espanaye's neighbors, who heard the murders take place, give contradictory statements, each claiming to have heard the killer speak a different foreign language - a language that none of them could recognize.

This leads Dupin to conclude that the witnesses weren't hearing a human voice. His theory is proven correct when he finds a hair at the crime scene that is not human. It belongs to an orangutan.

Dupin places an ad in the newspaper asking if anyone has lost an orangutan. A sailor shows up at his home to answer the ad. He had been keeping a pet orangutan he'd acquired in Borneo, but the animal escaped. Dupin interrogates the sailor and solves the crime.

When the orangutan escaped, it made off with the sailor's straight razor. When it got into Madame L'Espanaye's apartment, it attempted to shave her, mimicking its owner. The resulting bloodbath incited the orangutan to a frenzy.

It strangled Madame L'Espanaye's daughter, and, fearing its owner's whip, stuffed her body in the chimney to hide it. When the sailor learned of the "murders," he panicked and fled, allowing the orangutan to escape again.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue was a huge hit with both readers and critics. A review in the Pennsylvania Inquirer proclaimed that "it proves Mr. Poe to be a man of genius... with an inventive power and skill, of which we know no parallel."

Poe's detective, C. Auguste Dupin, would return in The Mystery of Marie Roget (1842), and The Purloined Letter (1844). The Murders in the Rue Morgue would be adapted several times for the radio, screen, and television.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue would also start a new subgenre - the locked room mystery. A locked room mystery involves a logically impossible crime, a crime where no evidence exists to prove that a crime was committed, or a crime where a person is convicted by evidence proving his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, but the sleuth doubts it and proves his innocence.

---

Quote Of The Day

---

"It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic." - Edgar Allan Poe, from The Murders in the Rue Morgue

---

Vanguard Video

---

Today's video features a complete reading of Edgar Allan Poe's classic short story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Enjoy!

Notes For January 19th, 2021

---

This Day In Literary History

---

On January 19th, 1809, the legendary American writer Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His parents, Henry Leonard Poe and Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe, were both actors.

At the time of his birth, they were in a production of Shakespeare's King Lear, and Edgar may have been named after the character in the play.

When Edgar was a year old, his father abandoned the family. A year later, his mother died of tuberculosis. He was adopted by Scottish merchant John Allan, who changed his name to Edgar Allan Poe and had him baptized in the Episcopal Church.

As a parent, John Allan proved to be a man of extremes; he was both an incredibly doting father and a ferociously strict and aggressive disciplinarian. In 1815, the Allans sailed to England.

At six, Poe briefly attended a grammar school in his adoptive father's hometown of Irvine, Scotland. By 1816, he rejoined his family in London, where he attended a boarding school in Chelsea until 1817.

By 1820, Poe and his family had moved back to the United States, settling in Richmond, Virginia. In 1824, Poe, then fifteen years old, served as a lieutenant in the Richmond youth honor guard during the celebrated visit of the Marquis de Lafayette.

Two years later, Poe enrolled at the University of Virginia, where he majored in languages. The university had been founded a year earlier by Thomas Jefferson.

The experimental college had strict rules against such things as tobacco, alcohol, and gambling, yet it also employed an honor system of student self-government.

Poe found the system chaotic and dysfunctional, adding to the stress he was already under; his engagement to his childhood sweetheart Sarah Elmira Royster was called off, and he became estranged from his father after his gambling debts cut into his college finances.

A year later, still struggling to pay for his education and unhappy with the honor system, he left university. After he learned that Sarah had married another man, Poe believed there was nothing left for him in Richmond.

So, in 1827, he moved to Boston, where he worked as a clerk and a newspaper writer. He began writing poetry and fiction under the pseudonym Henri Le Rennet.

In May of 1827, unable to support himself, Poe enlisted as a private in the U.S. Army, using the alias Edgar A. Perry. He claimed he was 22 years old, though he was really 18. He was stationed at Fort Independence in Boston Harbor and earned $5 a month.

That same year, his first book was published. It was a poetry collection titled Tamerlane and Other Poems. The byline read "by a Bostonian." Only 50 copies of the book were printed, and it went practically unnoticed.

Poe's regiment was posted to Fort Moultrie in Charleston, South Carolina, where he won a promotion and his monthly pay was doubled. After serving for two years, he was promoted to Sergeant Major for Artillery.

Then he decided that he wanted to end his five-year enlistment early and enter the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He revealed his real name and age to his commanding officer, Lieutenant Howard.

Howard would only discharge him if he agreed to reconcile with his adoptive father, John Allan. He wrote to John repeatedly, but received no reply. When he visited him in February of 1829, Poe found that his father hadn't even bothered to tell him that his mother had died.

Despite this, Poe and his father did reconcile, and John Allan supported his decision to leave the Army. Before entering West Point, Poe moved to Baltimore to stay with his widowed aunt Maria, her daughter Virginia, his brother Henry, and his grandmother, Elizabeth Cairnes Poe.

His second poetry collection, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems was published. In October of 1830, Poe's father remarried. Poe disapproved of both the marriage and the illegitimate children sired as the result of John Allan's philandering.

This led to bitter quarrels between the two men, and Poe's father disowned him. Poe left West Point by deliberately getting himself court martialed. In February of 1831, he moved to New York City.

There, he released his third poetry collection, Poems. The book was financed in part by Poe's fellow West Point cadets, who loved the satirical poems he wrote that made fun of their commanding officers.

In Poe's third book, his long poems Tamerlane and Al Aaraaf were included again. The book also featured early versions of To Helen, Israfel, and The City In The Sea.

A month after he arrived in New York, Poe returned to Baltimore to stay with his aunt, cousin, and brother. His older brother Henry died five months later from complications due to alcoholism. Afterward, Poe decided to try and make a living as a writer.

Unfortunately, copyright laws were practically nonexistent in the early 19th century, and pirated editions of literary works were common. Undaunted, Poe put his poetry on the back burner and turned to prose. He sold a few short stories and began work on his only play, Politian.

In 1833, Poe's short story MS. Found In A Bottle won him a prize from the Baltimore Saturday Visiter. It also brought him to the attention of John P. Kennedy, a novelist and prominent Baltimorian.

Kennedy helped him sell some more stories and land a job as assistant editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond in August of 1835. He was fired a few weeks later for being drunk on the job.

Poe returned to Baltimore, where he secretly married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia. After he promised to behave, Poe was reinstated at the Messenger. He and Virginia and her mother moved to Richmond. Poe and Virginia later had a second, public wedding ceremony.

By 1838, Poe's only complete novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, was published. It was widely reviewed and praised. In the summer of 1839, Poe became the assistant editor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine.

There, he published numerous short stories, reviews, and articles, building his reputation as both a writer and a critic. That same year, his classic short story collection, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, was published in two volumes.

Regarded today as one of the all time great works of American literature, the collection received mixed reviews and he made little money from it. In 1840, Poe became assistant editor of Graham's Magazine.

He made plans to start his own literary magazine, The Stylus, but his plans fell through. Two years later, his wife Virginia was stricken with tuberculosis. As her illness worsened, he began drinking heavily.

He left Graham's and returned to New York, where he worked for the Evening Mirror, which would publish his celebrated poem, The Raven, in January of 1845.

Poe was paid only $9 for it, but the poem became a huge hit and made him a household name. Children would follow him as he walked down the street, and he would caw "Nevermore!" at them. They would scream and pretend to run away, then laugh and follow him until he cawed "Nevermore!" at them again.

Poe later become editor and then owner of The Broadway Journal. Still drinking, Poe would alienate himself from his fellow writers when he publicly accused poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of plagiarism. Longfellow never responded to the charge.

After The Broadway Journal failed, Poe moved into a cottage in The Bronx, which is known today as Poe Cottage. Not long after he moved in, his wife Virginia died of tuberculosis. Poe was devastated and plunged into a quagmire of alcoholism and mental illness.

Later, he dated poet Sarah Helen Whitman, who lived in Providence, Rhode Island. Their engagement was called off as a result of Poe's drinking, his mental instability, and the interference of Sarah's mother, who did all she could to sabotage the relationship.

Poe returned to Richmond and resumed his relationship with his childhood sweetheart, Sarah Elmira Royster. He returned to Baltimore, then mysteriously disappeared. On October 3rd, 1849, he was found wandering the streets of Baltimore by a man named Joseph W. Walker.

Severely ill, incoherent, and wearing someone else's clothes, Edgar Allan Poe was taken to Washington College Hospital, where he died four days later at the age of 40. His death certificate and medical records were lost, so the actual cause of his death remains a mystery.

Newspapers reported that he died of "congestion of the brain" or "cerebral inflammation," which were common euphemisms used when a person died of illicit causes such as alcoholism, drug addiction, or venereal disease.

Before his disappearance, Poe had given a manuscript to a friend of his. It was something he'd written a while back, a poem he described as "a little trifle that may be worth something to you." It was the manuscript for his last great poem, Annabel Lee, which would be published two days after he died.

Rufus Griswold, an enemy of Poe's, somehow became his literary executor. He wrote a biography of Poe called Memoir of the Author, where he described Poe as a depraved madman addled by drink and drugs.

Most of Griswold's claims were lies or half-truths; for example, although Poe was an opium user and wrote about it, he was a casual user and never became addicted to the drug.

Griswold's biography was virulently denounced by those who knew Edgar Allan Poe. The letters that Griswold presented as proof of his claims were later revealed to be forgeries.

Edgar Allan Poe's writings, especially his classic horror stories such as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat, The Cask Of Amontillado, and The Fall of the House of Usher continue to inspire new generations of writers.

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Quote Of The Day

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"Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality." - Edgar Allan Poe

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a complete reading of Edgar Allan Poe's classic short story, The Fall of the House of Usher - performed by Christopher Lee! Enjoy!

Notes For October 9th, 2020

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This Day In Literary History

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On October 9th, 1849, Annabel Lee, the classic final poem by the legendary American writer Edgar Allan Poe, was published. It was published posthumously by the New York Daily Tribune, as Poe had died two days earlier.

Edgar Allan Poe, born in Boston in January of 1809, would become most famous as a master of the short story and the author of classic Gothic horror tales such as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Cask of Amontillado, The Black Cat, and The Fall of the House of Usher.

However, he began his literary career as a poet, and would become famous for classic poems such as The Conqueror Worm and The Raven. His last great poem was Annabel Lee.

Written in May of 1849 as Poe's life was falling apart and his health rapidly deteriorating, Annabel Lee was an ode to his great love, his young wife Virginia, who had succumbed to tuberculosis two years earlier at the age of 24.

Virginia, a cousin of Poe's, was thirteen when they first married, though they wouldn't share a bed until she was sixteen. They adored each other. Virginia often sat close to Poe while he wrote. She maintained his pens and prepared his manuscripts for mailing.

In a letter to a friend, Poe wrote of his Virginia, "I see no one among the living as beautiful as my little wife." When she contracted tuberculosis in 1847 at the age of nineteen, Poe was devastated.

Virginia turned to her husband for the strength to fight her illness. A year before her death, she wrote this poem:

Ever with thee I wish to roam —
Dearest my life is thine.
Give me a cottage for my home
And a rich old cypress vine,
Removed from the world with its sin and care
And the tattling of many tongues.
Love alone shall guide us when we are there —
Love shall heal my weakened lungs;
And Oh, the tranquil hours we'll spend,
Never wishing that others may see!
Perfect ease we'll enjoy, without thinking to lend
Ourselves to the world and its glee —
Ever peaceful and blissful we'll be.

Unfortunately, as Virginia's illness grew worse, Poe fell back into the alcoholism that had nearly destroyed him in the past. Her death devastated the man who had loved her so dearly.

A friend remarked that "the loss of his wife was a sad blow to [Poe.] He did not seem to care, after she was gone, whether he lived an hour, a day, a week or a year; she was his all."

Drowning in his grief for Virginia, Poe visited her grave often and drank heavily. The more he drank, the worse his mental state became. He tried in vain to move on, knowing that he really couldn't live without her.

He dated poet Sarah Helen Whitman, who lived in Providence, Rhode Island. Their engagement was called off as a result of Poe's drinking, his mental instability, and the interference of Sarah's mother, who did all she could to sabotage the relationship.

Poe returned to Richmond and resumed his relationship with his childhood sweetheart, Sarah Elmira Royster. He later returned to Baltimore, where he plunged into a quagmire of severe alcoholism and mental illness. He fell into financial ruin and disappeared.

Before his disappearance, Poe gave a manuscript to a friend of his. It was something he'd written a while back, a poem he described as a "little trifle that may be worth something to you." It was his completed manuscript of Annabel Lee.

On October 3rd, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe was found wandering the streets of Baltimore by a man named Joseph W. Walker. Severely ill, incoherent, and wearing someone else's clothes, Poe was taken to Washington College Hospital. He died four days later at the age of 40.

Poe's death certificate and medical records were lost in a fire, so the actual cause of his death remains a mystery. Newspapers reported that he died of "congestion of the brain" or "cerebral inflammation."

These were common euphemisms used when a person died of illicit causes such as alcoholism, drug addiction, or venereal disease. They were also used when the authorities wanted to keep the real cause of death quiet.

Some scholars and biographers have suggested that Poe may have been murdered for political reasons or may have contracted rabies. Others theorize that he just drank himself to death out of grief, which, sadly, is the most likely case.

Rufus Griswold, an enemy of Poe's who had published his work in the past, somehow became his literary executor. He wrote a biography of Poe called Memoir of the Author, where he described the writer as a depraved madman addled by drink and drugs.

Most of Griswold's claims were either outright lies or half-truths. For example, although Poe was an opium user and wrote about it, he was only a casual user and never became addicted to the drug.

Griswold's biography was virulently denounced by those who knew Edgar Allan Poe. The letters that Griswold presented as proof of his claims were later revealed to be forgeries.

Over a hundred years after Poe's death, his classic poem Annabel Lee would inspire the legendary Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov to write his classic novel, Lolita (1955).

The novel opens with protagonist and narrator Humbert Humbert recalling his great childhood love Annabel Leigh, (named after Poe's Annabel Lee) her sudden death from typhus, and the grief that would lead him down a path of self-destruction, ending in his death.

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Quote Of The Day

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"The death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world." - Edgar Allan Poe

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a reading of Edgar Allan Poe's classic poem, Annabel Lee. Enjoy!

Notes For April 1st, 2020

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This Day In Literary History

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On April 1st, 1841, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, the classic short story by the legendary American writer Edgar Allan Poe, was published. Appearing in Graham's Magazine, it's considered to be the first detective story.

It also incorporates elements of horror, as its author was famous for his horror fiction, which made up the bulk of his writings. Horror elements also appeared in his poems, such as the classics Annabel Lee and The Raven.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue opens with a bizarre and brutal double murder that took place in the Rue Morgue, a fictional street in Paris. The victims, Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter, were found dead in an inaccessible room that had been locked from the inside.

Madame L'Espanaye's throat was slashed so deeply that her head was nearly severed. Her daughter was strangled and stuffed in the chimney. Parisian detective C. Auguste Dupin and his unnamed friend, who narrates the story, read an account of the murders in the newspaper.

Dupin's interest in the case is piqued, especially when a man named Adolphe Le Bon is arrested for the horrible crime and imprisoned, despite the fact that there is no evidence to prove his guilt. Dupin offers his services to the prefect (chief) of police.

The plot thickens as Madame L'Espanaye's neighbors, who heard the murders take place, give contradictory statements, each claiming to have heard the killer speak a different foreign language - a language that none of them could recognize.

This leads Dupin to conclude that the witnesses weren't hearing a human voice. His theory is proven correct when he finds a hair at the crime scene that is not human. It belongs to an orangutan.

Dupin places an ad in the newspaper asking if anyone has lost an orangutan. A sailor shows up at his home to answer the ad. He had been keeping a pet orangutan he'd acquired in Borneo, but the animal escaped. Dupin interrogates the sailor and solves the crime.

When the orangutan escaped, it made off with the sailor's straight razor. When it got into Madame L'Espanaye's apartment, it attempted to shave her, mimicking its owner. The resulting bloodbath incited the orangutan to a frenzy.

It strangled Madame L'Espanaye's daughter, and, fearing its owner's whip, stuffed her body in the chimney to hide it. When the sailor learned of the "murders," he panicked and fled, allowing the orangutan to escape again.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue was a huge hit with both readers and critics. A review in the Pennsylvania Inquirer proclaimed that "it proves Mr. Poe to be a man of genius... with an inventive power and skill, of which we know no parallel."

Poe's detective, C. Auguste Dupin, would return in The Mystery of Marie Roget (1842), and The Purloined Letter (1844). The Murders in the Rue Morgue would be adapted several times for the radio, screen, and television.

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Quote Of The Day

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"It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic." - Edgar Allan Poe, from The Murders in the Rue Morgue

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a complete reading of Edgar Allan Poe's classic short story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Enjoy!