60 free Edgar Allan Poe trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 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 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city was Edgar Allan Poe born in 1809?
Boston
His mother left him a watercolour of the city 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
His father abandoned the family in 1810 and his mother died of tuberculosis a year later.
Q 03Poe took his middle name from the Richmond merchant who raised him. What was his foster father's name?
John Allan
The Allans gave him their name but never formally adopted him.
Q 04Poe left the University of Virginia after one year, chiefly because of what?
Gambling debts
He claimed John Allan had not sent enough money to register, buy books or furnish a room.
Q 05Under what assumed name did Poe enlist in the US Army in 1827?
Edgar A. Perry
He claimed to be 22 but was actually 18, and served at Fort Independence in Boston Harbor for five dollars a month.
Q 06Poe's first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, was credited to whom on its title page?
A Bostonian
Only 50 copies were printed and it drew virtually no attention.
Q 07How many copies of Tamerlane and Other Poems are known to survive?
Twelve
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.
Q 08What rank did Poe reach during his two years as an enlisted soldier?
Sergeant major
It was the highest rank a non-commissioned officer could achieve, in the artillery.
Q 09How did Poe engineer his exit from the US Military Academy at West Point in 1831?
A deliberate court-martial
His fellow cadets then chipped in as much as 75 cents each to finance his next book of 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
Its first sign came in January 1842 when a blood vessel broke 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 Fordham cottage was moved a short distance in 1913 and now stands in Poe Park.
Q 13Which Richmond magazine did Poe join as assistant editor in 1835, only to be fired for allegedly drinking?
Southern Literary Messenger
Owner Thomas White reinstated him after Poe promised to behave.
Q 21What is the name of the lost love the narrator of The Raven is mourning?
Lenore
Poe based the poem's complex meter on Elizabeth Barrett's 'Lady Geraldine's Courtship'.
Q 22In which month is The Raven set?
December
Poe chose the month for its traditional association with the forces of darkness.
Q 23How many stanzas make up The Raven?
18
Each stanza has six lines, and Poe explained his supposedly methodical construction of the poem in The Philosophy of Composition.
Q 24In which essay did Poe describe the method he claimed to have used to write The Raven?
Q 14Poe planned for years to launch his own magazine, first called The Penn. What was it renamed?
The Stylus
It never published a single issue before his death.
Q 15Which famous American poet did Poe publicly accuse of plagiarism, in a feud his critics dubbed a 'War'?
H. W. Longfellow
The accused never responded, though his friends did.
Q 16What did Poe nickname the transcendentalists, after a pond on the Common in his birthplace?
Frog-Pondians
He 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
It appeared at the same time in The American Review under the pseudonym Quarles.
Q 18Under what pseudonym was The Raven simultaneously published in The American Review?
Quarles
Poe used several pen names, including Henri Le Rennet during his lean 1827 stint in Boston.
Q 19The talking raven in The Raven was partly inspired by a bird in which Charles Dickens novel?
Barnaby Rudge
Dickens's raven Grip is now stuffed and on display at the Free Library of Philadelphia.
Q 20In The Raven, the bird perches on a bust of which goddess?
Pallas Athena
The Greek goddess of wisdom underlines the scholarly setting of the narrator's chamber.
The Philosophy of Composition
He presents the poem as a product of cold calculation rather than inspiration.
Q 25Which 1841 story is generally credited as the first modern detective story?
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
Its sleuth, C. Auguste Dupin, set the pattern for Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot.
Q 26Who turns out to be the killer in Dupin's first case, set on a fictional Paris street?
An orangutan
Dupin works it out from a tuft of hair and places a newspaper ad asking whether anyone has lost such an animal.
Q 27In which city does Poe's detective C. Auguste Dupin operate?
Paris
He appears in three stories, the last of which is The Purloined Letter.
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
The Pioneer lasted only three issues.
Q 30What are the names of the twin siblings in The Fall of the House of Usher?
Roderick and Madeline
The sister falls into cataleptic, deathlike trances and is entombed while still alive.