The American Literary Blog

In honor of Edgar Allan Poe 's 205th birthday (he was born in Boston on January 19, 1809), here are five of my favorite posts that I...

Edgar Allan Poe and his work have become a mainstay of popular culture; his writings and his life story have been the inspiration for cou...

James Russell Lowell and Edgar Allan Poe had been friends and colleagues; both were poets, prose writers, critics, and editors. As Poe bec...

From his quaint cottage at Fordham, New York, Edgar Allan Poe wrote to editor and poet Nathaniel Parker Willis on April 20, 1849: The p...

It had been the dream of Edgar A. Poe to establish his own literary journal, one which maintained such high standards of excellence that it...

He collected several anthologies , among the highest-selling books in the entire century. An influential editor, a prolific literary critic ...

*Today's guest blog is by novelist Matthew Pearl , whose historical fiction mysteries include The Dante Club and The Poe Shadow . His...

Reprinted from the Edinburgh Journal of Science , the August 25, 1835 issue of The New York Sun newspaper, reported on "Great Astronom...

From Wikimedia Commons For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad ind...

A headline in the August 2, 1877 issue of The Dispatch announced the discovery of a "Hitherto Unpublished Poem of the Lamented Edgar...

Edgar A. Poe outlived several mothers and maternal figures. His birth mother, Eliza Poe , died when the boy was a month and a half shy of h...

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow would have had every reason to dislike Edgar Allan Poe in the 1840s. Poe, the preeminent American critic of his...

Edgar A. Poe married his first-cousin Virginia Clemm on May 16, 1836. He was 27; she was about three months shy of her 14th birthday. By t...

Frances Sargent Osgood died of tuberculosis on May 12, 1850 at her home in New York. She suffered from the disease for years, possibly as f...

At the end of Edgar Allan Poe 's life, the financially-struggling poet was ardently searching for a second wife (his first, Virginia Cle...

It's no secret that Edgar Poe married his 13-year old first-cousin, Virginia Clemm . The pairing was not particularly unusual for the...

From the January 29, 1845 issue of the New York Mirror , edited by Nathaniel Parker Willis and George Pope Morris (the editorial introdu...

Edgar Poe was born on January 19, 1809. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Poe became an orphan as an infant when his mother died (his father h...

On this day, January 16, in 1919, the 18th Amendment took effect in the United States — establishing 13 years of prohibition of the sale, m...

Edgar A. Poe started his literary career with an obscure self-published book of poems in July 1827. A second book of poems two years later ...