The Blueprints of Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was a great American short story writer and poet. Most people know him for his tales of mystery and the macabre but he was so much more than that. He was a master of innovation and most of his short stories became the prototypes for several genres or important classical works.

He was born Edgar Poe in Boston. His father abandoned his family a year later and his mother died when he was two. John Allan acted as a foster parent but he disowned him when Poe incurred large gambling debts after he registered at the University of Virginia to study languages. He enlisted in the American artillery to support himself and later as a cadet at West Point but resigned to follow a career in writing. He worked as a magazine editor, literary critic and publisher and was one of the first Americans who tried to make a living out of writing alone resulting in a financially difficult career. He secretly married his 13 year old cousin Virginia and because she suffered for many years from tuberculosis, Poe turned to drink. His poem The Raven became a popular sensation and made Poe a household name overnight. After Virginia's death his behaviour became erratic until his death in the streets of Baltimore under mysterious circumstances.

Poe's short stories have greatly influenced the literary world. His best known tales are Gothic, a popular genre of the time. His themes are usually death, body decomposition, torture, premature burial and the like. Stories like The Pit and the Pendulum, The Premature Burial, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, The Fall of the House of Usher and Morella became the blueprints for most of today's terror or horror stories.

Hop Frog and The Cask of Amontillado are tales of revenge. In fact the first one was used by Poe to avenge Elizabeth Ellet whose affections he had refused and she had gone on to spread gossips and start scandals about him.

The Black Cat and The Tell-Tale Heart examine the psychology of guilt produced by murder. These inspired Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment and Patricia Highsmith's five Tom Ripley novels (aka the Ripliad).

The Oval Portrait inspired Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.

The Gold-Bug is a story of cryptography and an early form of detective fiction. William Friedman, read it as a child and he said it influenced him to become a code breaker. He went on to decipher the Japanese “Purple Code” in WW2.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Poe's only novel, inspired Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. Together with A Descent into the Maelstrom it also inspired Jules Verne and established the Science Fiction genre. Verne in particular openly admired Poe. As well as writing a sequel to Poe's novel, his novel Around the World in Eighty Days was inspired from Poe's short story Three Sundays in a Week and Five Weeks in a Balloon comes from Poe's The Balloon-Hoax.

Finally The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Roget and The Purloined letter established the blueprint of the detective story. The idea of the master detective, his friend who is the narrator and the final revelation which is first revealed and then explained was not invented by Arthur Conan Doyle for Sherlock Holmes nor Agatha Christie for Hercule Poirot. Both authors merely plugged-in the characters and plot to Poe's formula and reaped a larger popular success.

Edgar Allan Poe was not just a literary craftsman who wrote great tales. In a mere twenty years he had invented a number of genres and for at least a century he influenced innumerable authors to write many more.