The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Edition. Edited by Stuart and Susan Levine. Indianapolis, 1976.

Notes from the Introduction on Poe's life and reputation {see Poe's problematic biography}

The image of Poe has changed greatly, although the old image still sticks in popular imagination. Here's the old (implausible and now thoroughly discredited, but titillating) image:
"a creepy chap, somewhere in an attic, bats flapping about his head as he sits at his desk,writing. A candle sputters in a wine bottle, perhaps, casting shadows which magnify his size on the cobwebby walls and ceiling. A second bottle on the cluttered desk holds unwholesome-looking liquor. He drinks, coughs, cackles, and writes a line. A gust of wind through the cracked panes of a small window almost extinguishes the candle, then a flash of weird lightning strays from cloud to moving cloud in the stormy sky, and in the unnatural and fitfully sustained brilliance we catch a glimpse of the maddened and eager eyes of the dope addict as he takes a shot of opium, morphine, laudanum, hashish, who-knows-what. He writes another line....the door opens quietly, and a young girl, hardly a teen-ager, enters. She would be beautiful were not her eyes so round and vacant, and were she not nervously chewing upon a knuckle. Sensing her, the man at the desk turns, and the look of crazed inspiration changes to one of perverted but calculating lust."

We also see the "agony of the possessed and sensitive genius, mistreated and misunderstood in the market-place world of an aggressively materialistic vulgar democracy. The writings themselves were used to document aspects of the strange personality. It was as though every word Poe uttered had come from a patient on the psychiatrist's couch, compulsively pouring out accounts of the spectres which haunted him."

OK, forget all that fictionalizing! We've discovered much about Poe since the first biography, written by his enemy Reverend Rufus Griswold, came out. For one thing, we can't say that he wrote out of compulsion. In fact, it's now well documented that most of his material is not original with him. He was immersed in the writing of his time, good and bad, and he repeatedly took story ideas from them. "While it is true that a man who deals repeatedly with such a macabre subject as burial alive must in some sense be fascinated by it, we see now that Poe's contribution was not the discovery of the psychologically revealing subject, but rather its utilization in a series of carefully crafted stories...was a far more conscious and methodical a craftsman than we used to think."

Yes, he did behave badly with his contemporaries in the literary world of the 1830s and 40s "because he knew that making himself notorious was good for the circulation of the magazines for which he worked and helped him sell stories to the others." He was also insecure in his craft, and so picked unjust fights. "But for the most part, Poe now appears as champion of higher literary standards than were then prevalent in the American literary world, and for the most part the battles which he waged seemed honorable." Literary gossip becomes an important part of his stories (which is quite bewildering to modern readers). His satirical fiction is now coming to seem more important than the madman in the garret tales. "Our own feeling is that he is playing games with us almost all the time."

There's also much philosophical consistency in Poe. "The Romantic movement is not merely a rebellion of the heart against the head, but an attempt on the part of artists to recapture the kind of power and centrality which artists in non-Western societies have always enjoyed." Poe in particular affirms a philosophy of "occultism," much like Melville, Emerson, Whitman. "To an occultist, the world is alive, sacred, and an organic whole. The Western rational tradition of analysis and specialization is felt to be evil; it compartmentalizes men into professions and sees the world as a series of subdivisions. Art becomes just one more subdivision, and the artist just a specialist producing a commodity, nice to have around, good for the prestige of the community or nation, entertaining and even inspiring if one likes his work, but not really essential. To an occultist, there are no divisions, and the artist cannot be separated from the scientist, the seer, the prophet. He is more like the tribal medicine-man than the writer-in-residence." Sometimes Poe satirizes this, but he is also a believer.

"In the new picture of Poe, then, the career is no longer an object lesson in the sterility of the American environment. The personal life is a shade less scandalous, but, if anything, more ambiguous because firm evidence of lurid behavior has largely been discredited. We see far stronger ties to his place and age than we used to; we see somewhat less 'mad genius' and somewhat more 'commercial craftsman.' More wit, erudition, and philosophical consistency are evident in the new Poe, and far less compulsion. If we cannot entirely do away with the popular image of guttering candles and circling bats, in short, we should at least be able to point to craftsmanship, detachment, and humor."
{more on Poe's enduring fame}

Poe's Early Years [See chronology for details]

His parents were extremely busy actors; his father separated from the family and his mother tied of tuberculosis when Poe was two. He was placed in the Richmond family of Mr. and Mrs. John Allan. The old picture sees those childhood years as a "sensitive and lonely child bullied by an aggressively domineering foster father whose only real interest was in his business," but it's probably not so bleak. They did take Edgar to England for a while and put him in good schools. After they returned, Mr. Allan was evidently unfaithful to his wife (after her death, he remarried, had a child, and so disinherited Edgar, whom he had never adopted.). Edgar had a number of romantic and sentimental little liaisons. He was a better student than most realize, at University of Virginia (he had to leave because of gambling debts) and later West Point. His learning was vast--he had to know much to bluff so well. He was surprisingly successful in the army, until he suddenly left West Point. However, his classmates raised money so he could publish a volume of poems.

He spent his life in the literary or, more often, sub-literary, world of American magazines. He entered contests with his stories, and won a few. He also began his close association with his aunt, Mrs. Maria Clemm. In 1836, at the age of 25, he married his 13 year old cousin, Virginia. This is not normal, and biographers have speculated much on this. Perhaps he did it to regularize the household; he certainly needed the mother of her mother. Perhaps he was a lecher. Or maybe he was impotent and she was safe. She wasn't mentally retarded though! She would die young, of tuberculosis like his mother.

The Professional Years

He was constantly under financial pressure. A bit of tact might have helped! He did find editorial posts, but felt like he could not work long without compromising his ideals. He was not lazy; he worked very hard, but also wasted energy attacking other writers. Some people were very kind to Poe, tolerant of his weaknesses; some were snakes. He could not hold his drink and was tactless; he was a weak man in many respects.  "He's kind, generous, courageous, exceedingly clever, and his mind roams freely and brilliantly over past and present. He's also unreliable and selfish the way only a weak person can be; he's a liar, a plagiarist, a sponge. When embarrassed, he's intolerable and immature....Poe begs for pity and deserves some. HIs high literary ideals sometimes got in the way of practical compromises which could have made a hard life more pleasant. But he sometimes violated those ideals, and just as often his trouble stemmed from nonliterary sources....He was not a nice person. He was, moreover, a reactionary, a snob, and a racist whose works give offense to Blacks, to Jews, to American Indian people, to Dutchmen, to Irishmen, to almost anyone who is not Edgar Poe. Yet his brilliance is indisputable, and his contribution to American and world literature enormous. The picture of the isolated genius, lonely and misunderstood in a workaday world, however, is nonsense. There never was an author--unless it was Mark Twain--more fascinated by the texture of everyday life in his own time and place and more intrigued by the new science he sometimes mocked, by the new technology he sometimes parodied, by the political scene he lampooned, and by the new wealth he hated and desperated envied.