An in-depth history of Poe’s time spent in the South Carolina port city where he secretly enlisted in the United States Army. Edgar Allan Poe arrived in Charleston in November 1827 chased by storms, both literal and figurative. Some of the author’s previous indiscretions caused him to enlist in the U.S. Army six months earlier under the pseudonym Edgar A. Perry. The more than one year that Poe spent stationed at Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island has been shrouded in mystery for nearly two centuries because Poe deliberately tried to hide his stint in the army. But despite Poe’s deceptions, the influences and impressions of the Lowcountry permeated his life and writing, providing the setting for Poe’s most popular and widely read short story during his lifetime, “The Gold-Bug,” and perhaps providing the inspiration for the real Annabel Lee. Author Christopher Byrd Downey details the hidden history of Poe in Charleston.

Scott Peeples here examines the many controversies surrounding the work and life of Poe, shedding light on such issues as the relevance of literary criticism to teaching, the role of biography in literary study, and the importance of integrating various interpretations into one's own reading of literature.

"We tend to think of Edgar Allan Poe as a loner, living in a world of his own imagination and detached from his physical environment. Poe might seem like a Nowhere Man, but of course he was always somewhere - just not at the same address for very long. The Man of the Crowd chronicles Poe's rootless life, focusing on the American cities where he lived the longest: Richmond, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. The Poe who emerges in The Man of the Crowd is a man whose outlook and career were shaped by his physical environments - mostly urban and almost entirely American. His career was tied closely to the rise of American magazines, so he lived in the cities that produced them and wrote not just stories and poems but journalism and editorials with an urban magazine-reading public in mind. For years he witnessed urban slavery up close, living and working within a few blocks of slave jails and auction houses in Richmond. In Philadelphia, he saw an orderly, expanding city struggling to contain its own violent propensities. And at a time when suburbs were just beginning to offer an alternative to crowded city dwellings, Poe tried living cheaply on the then-rural Upper West Side of Manhattan and, later, in what is now the Bronx. Though Poe rarely provided "local color" in his fiction, his urban mysteries and claustrophobic tales of troubled minds and abused bodies reflect his experience living among soldiers, slaves, and immigrants"--

Edgar Allan Poe, the renowned author of tales of mystery and madness, arrived in Richmond in 1810 at the age of one and left the city for the last time just two weeks before his death. Of his 40 years, he lived in Richmond for 13 years--far longer than in any other city. While other cities may claim him, Poe himself boasted in 1841, "I am a Virginian . . . for I have resided all my life, until within the last few years, in Richmond." It was in Richmond that Poe was orphaned at the age of two and where he was reared in the home of the tobacco exporter John Allan. In this city, the young Poe first fell in love, wrote his earliest poetry, began his career in journalism, and married his 13- year-old cousin.

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online.

Contemporary criticism about the works of Edgar Allan Poe.