Edgar Allan Poe Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
100 free Edgar Allan Poe trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
55 free Edgar Allan Poe trivia questions with answers. Edgar Allan Poe invented the detective story, helped invent science fiction, wrote the most famous poem in American literature and died in a Baltimore gutter at 40 without anyone knowing why. This quiz covers the whole strange arc: the actor parents, the foster father he fought with, the Army stint under a false name, the deliberate court-martial at West Point, the child bride, the magazine jobs he kept losing, and the death theories from rabies to election fraud. The stories and poems get their due too: The Raven and the Dickens bird that inspired it, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Cask of Amontillado, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Black Cat, The Gold-Bug, Dupin's three cases, Annabel Lee and The Bells. It suits English classes, book clubs and Halloween trivia nights alike, with easy questions up front and genuinely obscure ones at the back. Every answer was checked against the Wikipedia articles on Poe, his works and his death, and each question shows the sentence that supports it once you answer. Free, no signup.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city was Edgar Allan Poe born in 1809?
Boston
Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809; his mother Eliza left him a watercolour of Boston Harbor inscribed to her little son Edgar, who should ever love the place of his birth.
Q 02What was the profession of both of Poe's parents?
Actors
Both parents were actors: David Poe Jr. and Eliza Arnold Hopkins Poe performed with touring stage companies; David abandoned the family in 1810 and Eliza died in Richmond late in 1811.
Q 03Which Richmond merchant took in the orphaned Poe and gave him his middle name?
John Allan
John Allan, a Scottish-born Richmond tobacco merchant, took Edgar in after his mother's death in 1811; the Allans gave him their surname but never formally adopted him.
Q 04Poe left the University of Virginia after one year, chiefly because of what?
Gambling debts
Poe ran up gambling debts at cards while trying to cover expenses his foster father underfunded; when the debts went unpaid he left Charlottesville at the end of 1826 after one year.
Q 05Under what assumed name did Poe enlist in the US Army in 1827?
Edgar A. Perry
Poe enlisted as Edgar A. Perry on May 26, 1827, claiming to be 22 when he was 18; he was posted first to Fort Independence on Castle Island at five dollars a month.
Q 06Poe's first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, was credited to whom on its title page?
A Bostonian
The 1827 title page read simply 'By a Bostonian'; printed by Calvin F. S. Thomas, the pamphlet had a run of perhaps 50 copies and drew virtually no attention.
Q 07How many copies of Tamerlane and Other Poems are known to survive?
Twelve
Twelve copies are known to survive; one sold at Christie's in 2009 for $662,500, then a record auction price for a work of American literature.
Q 08What rank did Poe reach during his two years as an enlisted soldier?
Sergeant major
Poe rose to sergeant major for artillery by January 1829, the highest rank a non-commissioned officer could reach, after postings in South Carolina and at Fort Monroe in Virginia.
Q 09How did Poe engineer his exit from the US Military Academy at West Point in 1831?
A deliberate court-martial
Poe engineered a deliberate court-martial by skipping drills, classes and chapel; dismissed in March 1831, he left with cadets' subscriptions of 75 cents each toward his next volume, Poems.
Q 10How old was Poe's cousin Virginia Clemm when he married her in 1836?
13
He was 27; a witness at the ceremony falsely attested that she was 21.
Q 11What disease killed Virginia Poe in 1847?
Tuberculosis
Virginia died of tuberculosis on January 30, 1847, aged 24; the first sign had come in January 1842 when a blood vessel burst in her throat as she sang at the piano.
Q 12In which New York City borough is the cottage where Virginia died and Poe wrote his last poems?
The Bronx
The Poe Cottage stands in Fordham in the Bronx; the family rented it in 1846, and in 1913 it was moved a short distance across Kingsbridge Road into Poe Park.
Q 13Which Richmond magazine did Poe join as assistant editor in 1835, only to be fired for allegedly drinking?
Southern Literary Messenger
Q 21What is the name of the lost love the narrator of The Raven is mourning?
Lenore
The narrator mourns 'the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore'; Poe borrowed the poem's trochaic octameter from Elizabeth Barrett's 'Lady Geraldine's Courtship'.
Q 22In which month is The Raven set?
December
The poem is set in December: 'Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December; / And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.'
Q 23How many stanzas make up The Raven?
18
The Raven runs to 18 stanzas of six lines each, 108 lines in all, in trochaic octameter, each stanza closing on 'nothing more' or 'Nevermore'.
Poe joined the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond in 1835; owner Thomas W. White dismissed him within weeks over drinking, then reinstated him on a promise of sobriety.
Q 14What did Poe rename the magazine he planned for years to launch, first called The Penn?
The Stylus
Poe renamed his projected magazine The Stylus in 1843, dropping The Penn after the Philadelphia plan collapsed; despite prospectuses and subscription drives it never printed a single issue.
Q 15Which famous American poet did Poe publicly accuse of plagiarism, in a feud his critics dubbed a 'War'?
H. W. Longfellow
Poe accused Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of plagiarism in 1845, in a series of Broadway Journal articles dubbed the 'Longfellow War'; Longfellow never replied, though a defender signing 'Outis' did.
Q 16What did Poe nickname the transcendentalists, after a pond on the Common in his birthplace?
Frog-Pondians
Poe called the transcendentalists 'Frog-Pondians', after the Frog Pond on the Common in the city of his birth, and dismissed their writing as 'metaphor run mad' and 'mysticism for mysticism's sake'.
Q 17On what date did the New York Evening Mirror print The Raven under Poe's name, making him a sensation?
January 29, 1845
The Evening Mirror ran The Raven on January 29, 1845, as an advance printing from The American Review's February issue; the poem made Poe a household name almost overnight.
Q 18Under what pseudonym was The Raven simultaneously published in The American Review?
Quarles
The American Review printed The Raven in its February 1845 issue signed 'Quarles', a nod to the 17th-century emblem poet Francis Quarles; Poe had also used Henri Le Rennet as an alias in 1827.
Q 19The talking raven in The Raven was partly inspired by a bird in which Charles Dickens novel?
Barnaby Rudge
Grip, the talking raven in Barnaby Rudge (1841), was modelled on Dickens's own pet bird; Poe reviewed the novel and complained that its raven should have served a more prophetic purpose.
Q 20In The Raven, the bird perches on a bust of which goddess?
Pallas Athena
The raven perches 'upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door'; Pallas Athena, Greek goddess of wisdom, underlines the scholarly setting of the narrator's chamber.
Q 24In which essay did Poe describe the method he claimed to have used to write The Raven?
The Philosophy of Composition
In The Philosophy of Composition (1846), Poe claimed he built The Raven backwards from its climax, choosing 'Nevermore' for its long o and r sounds, presenting the poem as cold calculation rather than inspiration.
Q 25Which 1841 story is generally credited as the first modern detective story?
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
The Murders in the Rue Morgue, published in Graham's Magazine in April 1841, introduced C. Auguste Dupin, whose 'ratiocination' set the pattern for Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot.
Q 26Who turns out to be the killer in C. Auguste Dupin's first case?
An orangutan
The killer is an escaped orangutan belonging to a sailor; Dupin deduces it from a tuft of non-human hair and the inhuman strength required, then advertises for the animal's owner.
Q 27In which city does Poe's detective C. Auguste Dupin operate?
Paris
Dupin lives and works in Paris, sharing rooms in the Faubourg Saint-Germain with the unnamed narrator; he appears in three stories, the last being The Purloined Letter (1844).
Q 28In The Tell-Tale Heart, what feature of the old man drives the narrator to murder?
His pale blue eye
The narrator hides the dismembered body under the floorboards and then hears the heart beating.
Q 29The Tell-Tale Heart first appeared in 1843 in a magazine edited by which poet?
James Russell Lowell
James Russell Lowell printed The Tell-Tale Heart in the first issue of his short-lived monthly The Pioneer, January 1843, paying Poe $10; the magazine folded after three issues.
Q 30What are the names of the twin siblings in The Fall of the House of Usher?
Roderick and Madeline
Roderick and Madeline Usher are the last of their line; Madeline suffers cataleptic, deathlike trances, and Roderick entombs her in a vault while she is alive.