Edgar Allen Poe, Father of Modern Horror… Detective, Science Fiction, and Treasure Hunt Stories

This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people.

And to search for the Our American Stories podcast, go to the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Edgar Allan Poe is known for his scary short stories and poems. And when we look at his life, early tragedies explain a lot. But what we don't often think of when we consider Poe are his comedic writings, his detective stories, and even a bit of early science fiction. Here to pull back the curtain on Poe is Chris Sempner, curator at the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia.

Take it away, Chris. Poe was born in 1809, the same year as Abraham Lincoln. But he was born up in Boston. His parents were traveling actors.

So his mother was from England. She'd come here to the States as a little girl. And she'd been acting on stages up and down the East Coast.

You usually traveled up and down the coast with the theatrical seasons, always try to stay one step ahead of the next yellow fever outbreak. I mean, she had it pretty rough. She lost her mother to yellow fever in South Carolina, her stepfather to yellow fever in North Carolina, then her first husband to yellow fever in Virginia. All by the time she was 18, then she remarried at age 18 to David Poe Jr., who was Edgar's father.

And he appears to run out in the family. Left Poe's mother to fend for herself and three kids. And when she was dying here in Washington, some local ladies heard the famous actress, Mrs. Poe, is in ill health.

She's out of resources. And they started bringing her meals. Even though a society lady wouldn't even associate with an actress, they were bringing her meals and caring for her. One of those ladies was Frances Valentine Allen. And she agreed to take in little Eddie. So she and her husband christened him Edgar Allen Poe. And his sister and brother went to live with different families.

You don't hear a lot about his brother. He died when he was four. His sister stayed here in Richmond, and she became a schoolteacher.

She taught art and penmanship. So Poe grew up here in Richmond and went to local schools. When he was six years old, the Allens went to England and Scotland. So he got to see Europe for a little while. He got to go to a good boarding school over there in London, came back here and was just enchanted by the landscape around here, the river. And that same river that's just a few blocks from where we're sitting now, Poe practically grew up in that river. He describes how he'd sail out to the little islands or swim. He's one of the best swimmers ever in that river. Today, he holds a record for swimming six miles against the tide in the James River.

Still hadn't been beaten. We had a guy come out here a few years ago, the swim fins and everything, saying, I'm going to beat Poe's record. And we never heard from him again.

Maybe he's still down there. But Poe also developed a love for poetry. His foster father never really warmed up to him, never legally adopted him. But he was an importer, exporter. He imported a lot of the latest British magazines. So Poe got a chance to read the latest British romantic poet. And he thought that this guy, Lord Byron, the guy they called mad, bad, and dangerous to know, was pretty much the greatest thing ever, the rock star of his day dressed in black. Byron swam the hella spot. That's part of the reason why Poe swam so much in the James River.

He's trying to be like Byron. But while Poe was here, he also first fell in love. He met a girl called Jane Stanner. He called the first purely ideal love of my soul and his poem to Helen is dedicated to her. He thought she was Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman who ever lived.

Problem was he's 14. She's his best friend's mother. So it wouldn't have really worked out. A poet's like unrequited love.

They like to worship somebody from afar. So he showed her his poetry. She gave him motherly advice and encouragement. She probably thought he was a nice, weird kid. But then shortly after they met, she went insane and died.

And that left a lasting impression on Poe. When he's growing up, his mother died when he was two. His first love here dies when he's 15. Then his foster mother died when he was 20. So over and over again, when he really became attached to someone, they end up dying early. And then he got married and his wife got sick and she died when she was just 24 years old. So he always had that sense that beauty was mingled with loss. And when he was about 15, he met another girl. Her name was Elmira Royster. She came from a pretty wealthy family. Her father was a merchant and there was no way her father wanted her messing around with this punk kid, this actress's son who'd never been legally adopted, wasn't going to inherit anything. So Edgar Noemire had to sneak away to the little garden up on Franklin Street just to see each other.

And they made this pact. I'm going to go to college and make a name for myself, get an education. I think Poe probably thought he was going to become a professor. Because you couldn't make a living off your poetry.

That would just be crazy. He's going to make a living from his professorship and write poetry in his free time. Sort of the Longfellow game plan. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the professor at Harvard, married a wealthy woman, and then he got to write poetry in his free time. And while he was out there, Poe excelled at languages. He studied ancient to modern languages.

Jefferson had this plan that students could pick their own curriculum. So he decided, I'm going to study that. Back here, Mr. Allen, the importer exporter, he thought, why are you wasting your time learning that?

You need to learn skills that are going to help you take over my import-export business. So Poe was there, no money. Allen wouldn't pay. He had no money. So he had this bright idea.

Why don't I gamble to raise my tuition money? And then he got himself about $2,000 in debt after the first nine months. He couldn't stay there, dropped out of college, came back here, and found out Elmira had dumped him. She'd done him wrong. So he decided, well, no more Elmira.

I can't go back to UVA. I'm going to go out and find adventure. So he stowed away aboard a coal ship. He's 18 years old and just ran away from home. Poe still didn't know the full story, though. She still loved him, apparently.

He'd been sending her letters from college. As soon as they got to her house, her father destroyed them. Her father did not want her to know that Poe had been writing her. Her father convinced her that Poe had forgotten about her. Maybe he'd met somebody better at college, even though it's all boys back then. So she thought she'd been forgotten.

She accepted a proposal from somebody else, and that's who she married. When you've been listening to Chris Sempner talk about the early life of Edgar Allen Poe and my goodness, all he knew it was loss. Beauty and love were always mingled with loss with young Edgar. When we come back, more of the story, the life of Edgar Allen Poe here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here, the host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we're bringing in inspiring stories from across this great country, stories from our big cities and small towns.

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Go to OurAmericanStories.com and give. And we're back with Our American Stories and the story of Edgar Allen Poe. Chris Sempner, curator at the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia, was just telling us about the unfortunate losses Poe experienced as a boy and how his childhood sweetheart, Elmira, married another man. As a result, Poe decided to strike out on his own.

Let's return to Chris. So he decided he's going to see the world, have all sorts of adventures. He enlisted in the U.S. Army up in Boston. They sent him down to Fort Moultrie in South Carolina, eventually up here to Fort Monroe in Virginia, and in two years made it from a private to a sergeant major. He did an outstanding job, different jobs during the time. He's a clerk for a while. He's an artificer. He makes gunpowder and explosives. Really technical, demanding job because we know he's good at it because he didn't blow off an arm or a leg doing it because a lot of this was really experimental back then, making sure that if you had the right amount of powder, that the projectile would arc at just the right point and go just right at velocity. So Poe did so well.

He said, you know what? I could make a living in the military. I could become an officer. And he was really chummy with his officers and they got him letters of recommendations. Also, back here in Richmond, the Allens were friends with General Winfield Scott. And this is a guy who was in the War of 1812, the Seminole Wars, Mexican American War. He was even later an advisor to Lincoln during the Civil War. So this is somebody that he's got some influence. And he helped Poe get into the United States Military Academy at West Point and they checked the records.

And for 10 years before that and 10 years after that, nobody else was on record for having gone from enlisted man to a cadet at West Point. Poe also heard while he was in the military, his foster mother Frances Allen was sick. And she said the last thing she wanted to see before she died was her little Eddie. And he made it back here a day late for her funeral. And he was just heartbroken over that. And that's when he said, I'm going to make something for myself for Frances Allen's sake. And Allen helped him get out of his enlistment because he still has enlistment.

He still has to serve that. So what you could do back then if you had the money was hire somebody to take your place and serve out the rest of your enlistment for. And you could get somebody for $25, but Poe's desperate. So he offers this guy a bully grave $75, a big chunk of change to take his place, but never paid him. And Allen had the money. Allen's worth about three quarters of a million dollars. So this guy's Bill Gates, but he didn't want to pay for it. Poe at one point got a letter from bully asking, well, where's my money?

I'm serving out your enlistment for you. Where's my money? And Poe wrote back, well, Allen has it. So ask him. So he wrote Allen, Allen act like I'm not paying you. So bully wrote Poe again, while Poe's at West Point and says, Allen says, he's doesn't know anything about it. So Poe writes back, you know, Allen, he's not sober very often. He probably just got drunk and forgot about the whole thing.

So he probably needs to be reminded. And that letter we found in Allen's files. So apparently bully show that to Allen says, Oh yeah, your son's talking smack about you.

He says, you're a drunk. And about that time when Allen cut Poe off for good and Poe decided West Point was not the place for him. He hated it there. He's racking up demerits left and right, but the cadets loved him.

They thought he's a funny guy, the great sense of humor, a practical joker. And they all chipped in about over 125 cadets chipped in to help him publish a book of poetry thinking it was going to be funny poetry, making fun of all the command officers. Instead, the book came out and there's a bunch of sad poetry about death and mourning and despair. And they threw most of the copies into Hudson River just to get rid of them. Even our copy has obscenities scrawled on the front page about how much that cadet hated it. He was ripped off. The book is a cheat.

They probably would have given Poe good beating, except he'd already been expelled. He wasn't there anymore by the time the book came out. So that book didn't really make a lot of waves, but some of the poems in it now we look back and say, Oh yeah, that's Lenore.

That's The Sleeper. These are some of his major poems. He's already publishing here at the age of 22.

He's already off to a good start. By the age of 22, this is his third book of poetry and it's got a lot of his classic poems, about half the poems he'd ever write. He got the hint now that poetry really wasn't going to pay the bills, but he saw that magazines were popping up everywhere. So he said, what do magazines want?

And he remembered growing up with Mr. Allen reading the latest British magazines that Allen was importing and they wanted scary, weird, mysterious stories. So Pope put together a bunch of bizarre stories and he heard there was a contest coming up, a hundred dollars for the best story, a huge chunk of change or a year's rent for the best story. He submitted a whole pack of stories and none of them won, but the magazine printed them anyway. So his works got in print, but he didn't get paid for them.

So that's a problem. He's always struggling to get paid from unscrupulous magazine editors and publishers, but he kept submitting more short stories, getting his works published, finally won a literary contest for the story manuscript found in the bottle. And that made him the right connections where he could get a job back here in Richmond. His foster father died the previous year. They'd never reconciled. Pope wanted to reconcile, wanted to see him one last time. And last thing he ever saw him was he had to force his way into the house past Allen's second wife. And Allen just shook his cane at him and said, get out. I never want to see you again.

I don't want to talk to you. So Pope left without ever rebuilding that bond. But Pope now had new bonds. He'd really become very attached to his aunt Mariah and her daughter, Virginia. And there was another cousin who was going to take in Virginia, but it looks like he wasn't going to take in the mother too. So Edgar wanted both of these women. He wanted them to be near him. So he moved them down to Richmond with him and he married his cousin, which wasn't unusual back then. They also married a lot younger back then. These two women just support him through everything.

And this guy, he really had to struggle at the messenger. He was making a decent living, which was not too much today. Today, the equivalent of 17,000 a year. So you may get by if you're single, but not with the family you've got to take care of and the wife, you've got to get tutors for her and a piano instructor.

And no matter how poor he was, he made sure she had a piano play because he loved to hear his wife play the piano and sing and Edgar would sing along and play his flute. When Pope got the job at the Southern Literary Messenger, he's 26 years old. He's kind of a nobody here, but the magazine's not really going anywhere. The circulation is about 500 copies a month.

He's buying it. The idea was that all the big cities up north, they're powerful, they're educated, they're influential. They have the big magazines, all the writers live up north and the South needs a writer. So he started out by sending in a story called Berenice. And he very specifically was told, we need to write stories that would educate and entertain the public without offending them. And Berenice is a love story about a man named Aegis who falls in love with his young cousin Berenice. And Aegis explains to you that sometimes he's a one-track mind. He can see a spot on the edge of a piece of paper and stare for so long he goes into a self-induced trance thinking about that little spot. So one day he sees Berenice smile and can think of nothing else but her precious pearly white teeth, becomes fascinated and obsessed with those teeth. But then she gets sick and she wastes away and she's buried. So he goes back to his chamber and he fantasizes.

He dreams of her teeth until he puts himself into a tooth trance until he's snapped out of it by a servant banging the door, says, wake up, snap out of it. Your wife wasn't really dead. We accidentally buried her alive. We heard her screaming in the cemetery, rushed out to rescue her there.

By the time we got there, somebody else had already dug her up and she didn't have any teeth. It was a pretty gruesome story. You get an anger reviews rather magazines and you can't publish this. This is interest to the public morals.

You should ban this sort of thing. But Pope almost got fired here, but he told his boss, trust me, this is what's going to sell. You're going to see if this is successful or not based on the circulation of the magazine.

This is what people want. And he's right. You know, in a year's time, their circulation increased seven times as the most popular journal in South. He had a national reputation. And you've been listening to Chris Sempner, the curator at the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia, and that James River six miles. Poe swam. It's still a record, by the way, upstream.

No joke. And what a story we're hearing about loss, about the writer's struggle. And still to this day, the artist struggle is it is. And he had to pay the bills and he had this idea.

He had this inner knowledge of what the people wanted and he gave it to them. And when we come back, we're going to learn more about what happens next in Poe's remarkable life here on Our American Story. And we're back with Our American Stories and the story of American author Edgar Allan Poe. We last heard that Poe had published one of his famously eerie stories and been threatened with termination from the magazine's writing staff until the magazine's readership went up sevenfold and started Poe's ascent as a national figure. Let's return to the curator of the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia, Chris Sempner. So people in the big cities were reading Poe now. They knew of him. So from here, he was able to move to New York and then to Philadelphia and go from one magazine to the next, publishing some of the biggest magazines in the country, like Godey's Lay's book, which is a circulation about 100,000 copies. That's where the casket of Amontillado was first printed. Still, he's struggling to make a living because some of his stories that follow along this vein are a little bit too much, like the Tell-Tale Heart got rejected by the Boston Michelin.

They said, we've got to accept something a little bit quieter next time. And so he only got paid $10 for that by the Boston Pioneer, which desperately needed money. But these kind of stories, they attracted an audience, but he wanted to show people that he could write more diverse things. He wrote a story called Hans Fall in the magazine. It was about a fellow who, to escape his debt collector, something Poe knew very well, decided, why don't I just build a spaceship and go to the moon? So Poe said, well, what kind of spaceship would get you there? Definitely have to be sealed up so that you wouldn't die as soon as you left the Earth's atmosphere. And how quickly would it have to travel in order to break free of the Earth's atmosphere?

How long would it take to get to the moon? And he started thinking about the science behind the fiction. And that's when he sort of gave birth to a new genre, well before its time, science fiction. He wrote stories about balloon trips and about the future. Malonta taught us about the year 2848, how we're all flying across the ocean rather than sail, take you three weeks to get to England.

You're just zipping back and forth in the air. You're communicating electronically, long distance across the ocean. So he had visions of what the future would be like, but he also used his science fiction as a way to comment on contemporary society. So he's always very interested in that. And Jules Verne, still a kid when the story came out, seven years old when Hans Fall was published about the trip to the moon, he grew up reading Poe's works and he said, he's onto something. I like this scientific verisimilitude, this idea of science used to make a fantastic story seem possible. And that may have inspired Verne to make his living as the great science fiction writer, the father of science fiction. But why is this important?

If you really think about it, we've been to the moon and the people who started our space program, they said when they grew up growing up, they are reading Jules Verne. Poe was interested in the minds of the murderers. And he actually at one point reported on a trial. There's a fellow James Wood who was on trial for murder. And he claimed that he'd been insane. He claimed he's not guilty by reason and sanity. So Poe was reporting on the case for his magazine and watching the way Wood acted. And he said, well, you know, everybody expects that someone who's insane is going to be ranting and raving because that's the way we've seen in literature and in art, but he's been calm and everything. He says maybe that's a sign of his insanity. And I think that's one of the sources possibly for the telltale heart, this guy who assures you he's not insane. See how calmly, how healthily I can tell the whole tale that this is a guy that's just boiling underneath the surface and Poe wanted to find out what is that underneath the surface that separates the madman from the sane.

What is it? And in some of the stories he writes about this urge within us that we have this ego telling us what's to do. We have this feeling of what's right and wrong with him. We have this dark force inside of us. He sometimes calls the imp of the perverse that makes us do the wrong thing for the wrong thing's sake, to do harm to ourselves.

That feeling when we're on the edge of a cliff, it's urging us to jump off the cliff, even though we know it's going to destroy us. But he's also interested in the new science of criminology. There was a fellow, Jean Vidocq, the French chief of police, who was a former criminal who became the police chief. And he started studying the way crime scenes can be analyzed, the way criminals behave. And this is a time when Poe was writing it, New York City still didn't have a police department.

The word detective is not yet into the English language, this combination of close observation and analysis. And Poe created a new hero, a new kind of fictional hero we hadn't seen before. He's not the typical hero. He's not brave or powerful or strong or anything like that.

This is a guy who works entirely within his mind. His name's Auguste Dupin. And he and his sidekick seem to solve impossible crimes just by using reason and analysis. For one crime, there's two women who have been murdered inside a locked room that's still locked from the inside when the police break down the door.

And Dupin studies the crime scene, looks for things that are out of place, like some strands of hair that don't quite look human. And Poe launched a new literary genre, The Detective Story, just a year later. So this was 1841. And later the same year, there's a lady called Mary Rogers. She was very popular cigar store clerk in New York City when proper ladies didn't typically work in cigar stores. And then all of a sudden she disappeared. And she was missing for three days and they found her floating in the Hudson River off of Hoboken. Back then, you either had to catch something, the actor get a confession, nobody confessed, they gave up and say, you know what?

Bet is the Irish. There's a lot of Irish and German immigrants coming to the United States then forming gangs. You've probably seen movies like The Gangs of New York. And they said, probably a gang of hoodlums killed her. And there's nearby roadhouse sort of near where she was found in Hoboken. And the lady living there, Henrietta Loss, said, oh yeah, I think I heard some gang of hoodlums out there that night. And yeah, it's probably just hoodlums killed her.

And Poe said, well, that doesn't make any sense. We know there's been rewards offered and somebody would turn in the other guys to get the award of her gang. And also these scratch marks on her back indicate she was dragged to the river.

A gang would have just picked her up and dumped her in the river. We're looking for somebody different. And not only that, Poe wrote letters to different magazines saying, I figured out I cracked the case. And you know, so I won't get sued for libel or anything like that.

I'm going to change the setting from New York to Paris. And I'm going to make the hero of the story, my old fictional detective, Auguste de Panne. But all the crime scene and everything I described is going to match up to the real case and it all matches up to the real newspaper descriptions. And he said, and in some of his letters, he wrote to magazines in Baltimore and Boston saying, you know, this is not just going to be an entertaining story. This is going to be a roadmap that law enforcement can use in the future to solve cases just like this. So he wanted there to be practical applications for this. He wanted this to change the way that we investigate crimes.

So he really saw this as being a game changer. So the story got in print and he never did solve the mystery because at the very end, there's a note from the editors basically saying they will only be sued for libel by saying his name. So not going to tell you who did it.

But they said, you know, you can just pretty much just follow the clues and figure out who did it. And Poe claimed that he'd always solved it, but that he couldn't tell you. And you've been listening to Chris Sempner, curator of the Poe Museum, telling the story of Edgar Allan Poe and a diversified literary portfolio. Poe assembled from poetry to science fiction to literally creating the detective story. And it didn't exist before he did it.

This genre did not exist. And by the way, it actually helped detectives be better detectives. In the end, what we learn here also is how one person's vision affects another and then affects real life. The science behind science fiction interested Poe. His work influenced Jules Verne.

Jules Verne's work influences our astronauts who end up going to space because of something in print. More of the story of Edgar Allan Poe here on Our American Stories. And we're back with Our American Stories and the final part of our story on the life of Edgar Allan Poe. We just heard from Chris Sempner that Poe was instrumental in creating a brand new genre of storytelling, the detective story.

And it claimed to have solved a real life murder mystery. Back to Chris with a final portion of this tale. Finally he moved up to Philadelphia.

So Richmond to New York to Philadelphia. That's where he published The Murders in the Rue Morgue. He published The Gold Bug, The Black Cat. He started making a name for himself. Things were starting to go his way.

And he was getting pretty comfortable working at Graham's Magazine, which became the most popular magazine in the country at the time. And one night his wife was singing the piano and she started coughing up blood. And they realized she had tuberculosis. This was a death sentence. There was no cure for it.

Other than maybe some mercury pills, which would kill you by giving you mercury poisoning and kill you some other way. So he spent the next five years trying to figure out what would help her and nothing really could. They didn't really have any cure. There was a certain kind of beer they gave her that probably wouldn't do anything. They thought cold fresh air would help her.

Maybe just give you pneumonia instead. Still undeterred, he moved from there to New York City and really wanted to make a splash there. And as soon as he got there, he reported in the New York Sun that somebody had just crossed the ocean in a hot air balloon. Everybody rushed out to buy the papers and learn all about it.

Turns out the whole thing was fake. He played a hoax on everybody, but it got him noticed. So Poe was getting popular, his stories were getting read, but he still wanted to be recognized as a poet and he'd worked for months and months on this perfect poem.

This is going to be a good hundred line poem, much longer than a lot of the other things he'd written. And he finally got the nerve to send to a publisher into Graham's Magazine. He used to work for Graham's Magazine. The editor, the owner of the magazine loved him and they wouldn't publish it. And he took another magazine and rejected it.

At one magazine, they passed around the room and read it and they felt so sorry for him that they passed around a hat to collect donations. Well, we can't buy his poem because it's awful, but at least we'll give him a few bucks to get some food. And people were saying, this poem doesn't make any sense. Why is a guy talking to a bird that obviously only knows how to say one word?

Why would you keep asking it questions if it's only going to give the same word answer, especially if you don't want that answer? Like, tell the soul of sorrow laden, if within the distant aid and it shall clasp the saint and maiden with the angel's name Lenore. Why would you ask the raven if you're ever going to be reunited with your beloved Lenore if you know it's going to tell you nevermore? It doesn't make any sense, but the guy's torturing himself. He's driving himself to do this. This guy's really picking at a scab.

He knows that he longs for Lenore, so why would he keep asking the raven to say nevermore to remind him that he can never see her again? And finally, he got it published. He didn't get it published in a literary magazine. He got it published in a political journal for the Whig party called the American Review, and they pay him the space rates of the day, about $15, which is about $350 a day's money.

So not great, but it's filler material. And he didn't even put his name on it. He said to one person it's so bad he didn't want to ruin his reputation by putting his name on it, so it's a sign of the pseudonym Quarrels. And as soon as it got in print, another magazine saw it, and the editor reprinted it without paying him. But at least they printed it under his name, and they added an introduction that said, this will stick to the memory of everyone who ever reads it.

And today we know that's true because you can't hear the word nevermore without thinking of Edgar Allan Poe and the raven. So that's the one that made him a huge superstar, and he was able to travel the country giving performances of it. So finally he achieved that stardom, but this is also when his wife was dying, and she encouraged him to move to the country. They thought the fresh country air would help him, so they moved to a tiny cottage in the Bronx.

The Bronx used to be the countryside about 15 miles outside New York City, and that's where she died at the age of 24. He only survived for another two years, and he spent a lot of that traveling. But finally at the end of his life, he was back in Richmond, and he was lecturing at the Exchange Hotel, the biggest hotel in town, you know, spending time with his sister, catching up with old friends. And he happened to hear that his old girlfriend Elmira was single now. So he started showing up at her house, and the first time he showed up, just out of the blue. But he kept coming back and coming back until she accepted him, and he convinced her that they should be married after all those years. And he got her a nice gold engagement ring, got her gold locket with some of his hair inside of it. But she agreed to marry him, and she wrote a letter to his aunt.

Remember, his biological father's sister or his mother-in-law. She's still up in the cottage in the Bronx while Poe is traveling. And Elmira said, I never really stopped loving Edgar. And Elmira also wrote to Muddy that, I look forward to calling you mother and to welcoming you into my home. So she was going to take Poe's mother-in-law in with her. So imagine having your husband's first wife's mother living with you, but she was going to bring her into the house along with her son. Her son was about 10 years old. Her daughter was a teenager, so she'd already married and moved out of the house by then. But it was going to be probably a full house.

And Edgar would have to go back to the Bronx. He was going to go as far as New York and pick up his mother-in-law and bring her back here for the wedding. So he caught the early morning steamship. He was very sick, and Elmira said he had a fever and a weak pulse and was kind of dizzy. And she said, you shouldn't travel, stay here a few more days, even visit a doctor.

And the doctor said, you know, if you travel, it'll be the death of you. We don't know exactly what was wrong with Poe, but he made as far as Baltimore. The steamship would have taken him from here to Norfolk to Baltimore. And then he would call a train to Philadelphia. And he disappeared for five days.

When they found him, he was still in Baltimore. Then they took him to the hospital where he was in and out of consciousness for four days, delirious, talking to shadows on the wall, not making any sense. But he kept saying, I have a wife back in Richmond.

I have to get back to my wife. But he died 10 days before he could marry Elmira, 10 days before he had a happy ending. And the only clue he gave us was he screamed the name Reynolds over and over again on his very last night. And he calmed down and his last words were Lord help my poor soul. And he died at the age of 40.

The doctor said his case of phrenitis or inflammation in the brain, which kind of a catchall, which could mean meningitis, but it could mean other things. And he was buried up there in Baltimore. They tend to bury you where you died. This unmarked grave is soon overgrown with weeds. But people kept coming to see the grave.

They kept wanting to see it. And the sexton finally put a rock on there so he'd know where the grave was so he could show up. You know, that's where he's buried right there.

And it was 26 years after he died. Teachers and students who love reimposed works really got behind this idea of putting a monument on Poe's grave. And they got the nicest monuments in the whole cemetery, too big for the spot where he was, in fact. So they decided to put the monument in a place of honor right next to the cemetery gates or right near the sidewalk. So you wouldn't even have to break into the cemetery to see it.

It would be right there as its face on the front, this big, huge thing. So after all these years, it was the kids who loved reading Poe's works and the teachers who loved teaching Poe's works and sharing them that got behind the idea of building him a monument for his grave. And even if it was in a different spot, they actually had to dig him up and move him across the cemetery to go to the new spot. And so that's where he is today. And he's been memorialized by teachers and artists and writers ever since. Sir Arthur Colm Doyle said there really wasn't much original you could do after Poe, that he invented the detective story. He said, where was the detective story before Poe breathed the breath of life into it? He established the genre, the characters, the different plot devices. He did a whole series of these detective stories. And Jules Verne called him the leader of the cult of the bazaar.

Poe was the first American writer to really make a huge impact around the world, not just to be popular overseas, like say, Washington Irving, but actually to be influential overseas, to actually change the way other writers thought about their art. The Gold Bug, and it's about an eccentric entomologist named Legrand. Legrand says he's got a drawing, but he doesn't have the drawing. It turns out he holds a piece of parchment over a flame and reveals there's invisible ink. There's a whole encoded message that gives him the series of clues he has to follow to find Captain Kidd's treasure. It's basically it's the plot of the Goonies. Also National Treasure, Da Vinci Code, they all have their origins in this story.

H.P. Lovecraft wrote a whole book about the history of weird fiction, though it's a whole chapter to Poe's. Other people have to share chapters, but Poe gets his own chapter. There was a film director, Alfred Hitchcock, who said that it's because I liked reading Poe's work so much that I started to make suspense films. Everyone should come to the Edgar Allen Poe Museum in Richmond because where else are you going to see Poe's socks or his hair or the Poe Museum cats? A terrific job on the editing and storytelling by Shad Straley and Robbie Davis. And a special thanks to Chris Semtner, curator of the Poe Museum in Richmond.

Go to pomuseum.org. And by the way, the story of how the raven got shopped around and rejected everywhere is the story of art. But the persistence of Poe, the perseverance of Poe against all odds to stick with it, and that he creates these new genres so much so that legends like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Hitchcock in England are affected. And these are masters of their domain. The story of Edgar Allen Poe, an American classic, here on Our American Stories.