Edgar Allan Poe

It is important for modern readers of Poe, perhaps accustomed to thinking of the publishing world in terms of giant corporate monoliths and best-seller lists, to understand that in the nineteenth century most writers made their living by publishing in periodicals - primarily newspapers and literary journals - rather than in single-volume collections of poems, stories, or a novel. Certainly one explanation for this was the cost of publications: books were more expensive (mass market paperbacks not yet having been invented) and less accessible (there being far fewer libraries with much smaller inventories than what we are accustomed to today).

From 1825 to 1850 there occurred a 600 percent increase in new American periodicals, due in no small part to new printing technologies, improvements in eyeglasses, the diffusion of public education, and an easier and wider distribution of printed texts by an expanding railway system. Consequently, most of Edgar Allan Poe's work - his poems, his short tales, his literary essays, and book reviews - were published initially by various periodicals before they were assembled into book volumes. While living in Baltimore in 1831, Poe struggled to launch his own literary career by writing and submitting stories to the Philadelphia Saturday Courier. Four years earlier, he had published his first collection of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems, and while he would continue to write verse all through his career, it was clear early on that he could not make a living writing poetry. As a result of his financial condition, Poe turned to composing stories, essays, and book reviews for a wide variety of eastern newspapers and journals.

Poe's own fiction and poetry likewise appeared in a variety of these contemporary periodicals. And while he was never paid handsomely for this work, newspapers and journals did provide him with an initial forum to display his prodigious talents. Poe was awarded several literary prizes, such as the Baltimore Saturday Visitor competition that he won 1833 with "MS. Found in a Bottle." While Poe's creative writing never amounted to much financially, he did manage to generate a certain measure of attention among some of the major literati of his time.

So while Poe's own literary efforts had both their detractors and admirers, the point is that his work was read during his lifetime, and he became an important literary figure in the eyes of other important writers and critics in the first half of the nineteenth century. The critical attention he did manage to garner, however, represented only a modest inception for Poe's fame; his true worth as a creative artist was to occur posthumously.

Among the flagrant lies and libels perpetrated by Griswold in this obituary and in his introduction to the 1850 volume of Poe's collected works were assertions that Poe had been expelled from the University of Virginia, that Poe was a drug addict and drank himself to death, that Poe had tried to seduce John Allan's second wife and maintained sexual relations with his mother-in-law, and that all of Poe's most perverse and depraved fictional characters were really personal confessions. The vicious portrait that Griswold concocted was devoid of sympathy for Poe's unhappy life, much less appreciative of his contribution to American literature. And perhaps worst of all, it became the unofficial biography for the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As we look back on Griswold's character assassination, an ironic justice emerges from the fact that Poe has since become one of the giants of American writing - rather than an incarnation of evil - while the man he trusted with his career has rightly earned all the scorn and disrepute he originally tried to assign to Poe. If Montressor, the cryptic narrator in "The Cask of Amontillado," could have witnessed the whole convoluted relationship between Griswold and Poe, he would have been quick to ascertain that final retribution belonged to Poe alone.