60 Fun Facts About Edgar Allan Poe

In which city was Edgar Allan Poe born in 1809?

His mother left him a watercolour of the city inscribed to her little son Edgar, who should ever love the place of his birth.

What was the profession of both of Poe's parents?

His father abandoned the family in 1810 and his mother died of tuberculosis a year later.

Poe took his middle name from the Richmond merchant who raised him. What was his foster father's name?

The Allans gave him their name but never formally adopted him.

Poe left the University of Virginia after one year, chiefly because of what?

He claimed John Allan had not sent enough money to register, buy books or furnish a room.

Under what assumed name did Poe enlist in the US Army in 1827?

He claimed to be 22 but was actually 18, and served at Fort Independence in Boston Harbor for five dollars a month.

Poe's first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, was credited to whom on its title page?

Only 50 copies were printed and it drew virtually no attention.

How many copies of Tamerlane and Other Poems are known to survive?

About a dozen are known. One sold at Christie's in December 2009 for $662,500, then a record for a work of American literature.

What rank did Poe reach during his two years as an enlisted soldier?

It was the highest rank a non-commissioned officer could achieve, in the artillery.

How did Poe engineer his exit from the US Military Academy at West Point in 1831?

His fellow cadets then chipped in as much as 75 cents each to finance his next book of poems.

How old was Poe's cousin Virginia Clemm when he married her in 1836?

He was 27; a witness at the ceremony falsely attested that she was 21.

What disease killed Virginia Poe in 1847?

Its first sign came in January 1842 when a blood vessel broke in her throat as she sang at the piano.

In which New York City borough is the cottage where Virginia died and Poe wrote his last poems?

The Fordham cottage was moved a short distance in 1913 and now stands in Poe Park.

Which Richmond magazine did Poe join as assistant editor in 1835, only to be fired for allegedly drinking?

Owner Thomas White reinstated him after Poe promised to behave.

Poe planned for years to launch his own magazine, first called The Penn. What was it renamed?

It never published a single issue before his death.

Which famous American poet did Poe publicly accuse of plagiarism, in a feud his critics dubbed a 'War'?

The accused never responded, though his friends did.

What did Poe nickname the transcendentalists, after a pond on the Common in his birthplace?

He dismissed their writing as 'metaphor run mad' and 'mysticism for mysticism's sake'.

On what date did the New York Evening Mirror print The Raven under Poe's name, making him a sensation?

It appeared at the same time in The American Review under the pseudonym Quarles.

Under what pseudonym was The Raven simultaneously published in The American Review?

Poe used several pen names, including Henri Le Rennet during his lean 1827 stint in Boston.

The talking raven in The Raven was partly inspired by a bird in which Charles Dickens novel?

Dickens's raven Grip is now stuffed and on display at the Free Library of Philadelphia.

In The Raven, the bird perches on a bust of which goddess?

The Greek goddess of wisdom underlines the scholarly setting of the narrator's chamber.

What is the name of the lost love the narrator of The Raven is mourning?

Poe based the poem's complex meter on Elizabeth Barrett's 'Lady Geraldine's Courtship'.

In which month is The Raven set?

Poe chose the month for its traditional association with the forces of darkness.

How many stanzas make up The Raven?

Each stanza has six lines, and Poe explained his supposedly methodical construction of the poem in The Philosophy of Composition.

In which essay did Poe describe the method he claimed to have used to write The Raven?

He presents the poem as a product of cold calculation rather than inspiration.

Which 1841 story is generally credited as the first modern detective story?

Its sleuth, C. Auguste Dupin, set the pattern for Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot.

Who turns out to be the killer in Dupin's first case, set on a fictional Paris street?

Dupin works it out from a tuft of hair and places a newspaper ad asking whether anyone has lost such an animal.

In which city does Poe's detective C. Auguste Dupin operate?

He appears in three stories, the last of which is The Purloined Letter.

In The Tell-Tale Heart, what feature of the old man drives the narrator to murder?

The narrator hides the dismembered body under the floorboards and then hears the heart beating.

The Tell-Tale Heart first appeared in 1843 in a magazine edited by which poet?

The Pioneer lasted only three issues.

What are the names of the twin siblings in The Fall of the House of Usher?

The sister falls into cataleptic, deathlike trances and is entombed while still alive.

What does the narrator notice running from the roof of the House of Usher down into the tarn?

The story ends with the fissure splitting the mansion in two as it collapses into the lake.

In The Cask of Amontillado, what is the name of the man Montresor walls up alive?

The story is set at Carnival time and ends with the revelation that fifty years have passed undisturbed.

The Cask of Amontillado first appeared in November 1846 in which unlikely publication?

The revenge tale is set in an unnamed Italian city at Carnival.

Prince Prospero hides from the plague in how many differently coloured rooms in The Masque of the Red Death?

A 1964 film version starred Vincent Price as the prince.

The narrator of The Pit and the Pendulum is a prisoner of which institution?

He is rescued when the French army under General Lasalle takes Toledo.

How does the narrator of The Pit and the Pendulum escape the descending blade?

He smears his straps with meat to attract them.

What is the name of the cat in The Black Cat?

The narrator's house burns down, leaving on one wall the burned outline of a cat hanging from a noose.

The Gold-Bug won a prize from the Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper and became what during Poe's lifetime?

It exploited a public craze for cryptography, and later inspired the codebreaker William Friedman as a boy.

The Gold-Bug is set at which South Carolina location, where Poe himself had served in the Army in 1827?

The treasure hunt turns on a substitution cipher that Legrand cracks.

Which is Poe's only complete novel?

Jules Verne wrote a sequel to it, An Antarctic Mystery, and The Guardian named it one of the greatest English-language novels in 2013.

Poe's 1848 prose poem Eureka is remembered for anticipating which scientific idea by 80 years?

He wrote it from pure intuition, and it is riddled with scientific errors, yet it also offered a plausible answer to Olbers' paradox.

Annabel Lee, Poe's last complete poem, is most often read as a tribute to whom?

His childhood sweetheart Sarah Elmira Royster insisted it was about her instead.

Poe popularised which unusual word for the ringing of bells in his poem The Bells?

It comes from the Latin tintinnabulum and is often wrongly assumed to be his own coinage.

In which city was Poe found delirious in a tavern on October 3, 1849, days before his death?

He was taken to Washington College Hospital and died on October 7, aged 40, without ever explaining what had happened.

One theory holds that Poe died as a victim of 'cooping'. What was cooping?

Citizens were forced to vote repeatedly for a candidate, and the tavern where Poe was found was a polling place.

What name did Poe reportedly call out repeatedly on the night before he died?

Nobody has ever established whom he meant.

Poe's rival Rufus Griswold published a slanted obituary the day of the funeral under what pen name?

Griswold then made himself Poe's literary executor and spent years blackening his name, using forged letters as evidence.

Which NFL team was named after Poe's most famous poem, in a 1996 fan contest?

Poe spent the early part of his career in the city and is buried there.

What did the mysterious 'Poe Toaster' leave at Poe's grave every January 19 from 1949 to 2009?

The visitor's last appearance came on Poe's bicentennial; a new Toaster was chosen by the Maryland Historical Society in 2016.

Which director said he began making suspense films because he liked Edgar Allan Poe's stories?

H. P. Lovecraft, for his part, called Poe his 'God of Fiction'.

Which French poet's translations made Poe especially revered in France?

His translations became the definitive versions of Poe across continental Europe.

Poe once proposed splitting the Appalachian South off into a nation with what name?

He floated the idea in Graham's Magazine in 1846.

What is Richmond's oldest standing building, home of the Edgar Allan Poe Museum, called?

Moldavia was the two-storey brick house John Allan bought with his 1825 inheritance.

Poe's dorm room at the University of Virginia, preserved for visitors, is which number on West Range?

He registered in February 1826 to study ancient and modern languages at Jefferson's brand-new university.

Poe was one of the first American writers to attempt what?

It made for a life of near-constant financial difficulty.

Which often-overlooked story won Poe a prize from the Baltimore Saturday Visiter in October 1833?

The win caught the eye of John P. Kennedy, who introduced Poe to the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger.

What is the title of Poe's only drama?

He began it in the early 1830s while turning from poetry to prose after critiques by John Neal in The Yankee.

In which US president's administration did Poe try to win a Custom House post in 1842?

He claimed to be a Whig, but missed a key meeting, claiming sickness; his friend suspected he had been drunk.

After his wife's death, Poe courted the poet Sarah Helen Whitman, who lived in which city?

The engagement collapsed, and there is strong evidence Whitman's mother intervened to derail it.

Which cryptologist, inspired by reading The Gold-Bug as a child, later broke Japan's PURPLE code?

Poe had invited readers of a Philadelphia paper to send him ciphers, which he then solved.