Edgar Allan Poe wrote his great works while living in several cities on the East Coast of the United States, but Baltimore's claim to him is special. His ancestors settled in the burgeoning town on the Chesapeake during the 18th century, and it was in Baltimore that he found refuge when his foster family in Virginia shut him out. Most importantly, it was here that he was first paid for his literary work. If Baltimore discovered Poe, it also has the inglorious honor of being the place that destroyed him. On October 7, 1849, he died in this city, then known as "Mob Town." Edgar Allan Poe's Baltimore is the first book to explore the poet's life in this port city and in the quaint little house on Amity Street, where he once wrote.

»A Tale of the Ragged Mountains« is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, originally published in 1844. EDGAR ALLAN POE was born in Boston in 1809. After brief stints in academia and the military, he began working as a literary critic and author. He made his debut with the novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket in 1838, but it was in his short stories that Poe's peculiar style truly flourished. He died in Baltimore in 1849.

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.

The 150th anniversary of the greatest Edgar Allen Poe mystery of all, his death, is finally put to rest.

Winner of the 2015 Edgar Award for Best Critical/Biographical! Follow the footsteps of the father of American horror fiction. Edgar Allan Poe was an oddity: his life, literature, and legacy are all, well, odd. In Poe-Land, J. W. Ocker explores the physical aspects of Poe’s legacy across the East Coast and beyond, touring Poe’s homes, examining artifacts from his life—locks of his hair, pieces of his coffin, original manuscripts, his boyhood bed—and visiting the many memorials dedicated to him. Along the way, Ocker meets people from a range of backgrounds and professions—actors, museum managers, collectors, historians—who have dedicated some part of their lives to Poe and his legacy. Poe-Land is a unique travelogue of the afterlife of the poet who invented detective fiction, advanced the emerging genre of science fiction, and elevated the horror genre with a mastery over the macabre that is arguably still unrivaled today.