The Raven’s Tale is a work of fiction, yet most of the characters, settings, and events portrayed in the novel emerged directly from Edgar Allan Poe’s biography. My goal in writing this novel was to offer readers a window into Poe’s teenage years using as many historically accurate details as possible. I wanted to root the book in his reality while also immersing the story in scenes of Gothic fantasy that paid homage to his legendary macabre works.
My search for the truth behind Poe’s past entailed poring over letters, school records, bills and payments related to his upbringing and education, and firsthand accounts from people who knew—or at least met—teenage Edgar, including his classmates in both Richmond and Charlottesville. My research also took me to Virginia, where I visited the Poe Museum in Richmond, the University of Virginia, and other significant sites from Poe’s childhood and teen years. Furthermore, I contacted Chris Semtner, curator of the Poe Museum, and members of the Friends of the Shockoe Hill Cemetery with questions about the novel’s setting, which they graciously answered.
Poe’s biography is problematic in that many people who knew him disagreed on details about his life and his character. His friends, associates, and foes tended to embellish facts with fiction when offering their personal accounts of interactions with him. Most notably, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, a known, bitter rival, published Poe’s first obituary two days after Poe’s death in October 1849. In it he created the “Poe as madman” mythology by penning such phrases as “[Poe] walked the streets, in madness or melancholy, with lips moving in indistinct curses” (Griswold, R. W., “Death of Edgar A. Poe,” New-York Daily Tribune, New York, NY, Vol. IX, No. 156, October 9, 1849). Griswold further sullied Poe’s reputation by fabricating details of the deceased poet’s life and forging letters for a piece that first appeared in International Monthly Magazine in October 1850. Griswold also published this damaging “memoir” in an 1850 volume of Poe’s work that he edited.
Even Poe himself told untrue tales about his past, such as claiming that his parents died in the Richmond Theater fire of 1811, as I portrayed him saying in The Raven’s Tale. Records prove that this was not the case about his parents. His mother, the popular actress Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe, died of an illness, most likely tuberculosis, on December 8, 1811, eighteen days before the fire. The date and cause of the death of his father, David Poe Jr., remains unclear, although records show that he and his wife parted ways before her death.
The process of putting together the pieces of Poe’s young life, therefore, felt like assembling a complicated jigsaw puzzle. Several gaps exist in his timeline from his return home from college in December 1826 to his enlistment in the U.S. Army in Boston on May 26, 1827. I filled in the missing moments with situations and events that seemed the most plausible according to letters and other records from Poe’s life.
Poe’s reputation as a drug addict is one of the myths that originated during his lifetime. Many of Poe’s protagonists used opium, but the belief that Poe himself was a drug addict probably originated in 1845 when a reviewer compared his work to “the strange outpourings of an opium eater” (Richmond Compiler, July 30, 1845). Two physicians who knew Poe, however, stated that they never saw any indications of him using the drug—and one of those men, Dr. Thomas Dunn English, hated Poe as much as Rufus Wilmot Griswold did.
Poe struggled with drinking on and off throughout his life, and more than one account from people who knew him states that a mere glass of alcohol, or even a long gulp, would lead to shifts in his personality, drunkenness, and/or long periods of sleep. His sister also experienced the same immediate effect from drinking, according to Susan Archer Weiss’s 1907 biography, The Home Life of Poe. As with other aspects of Poe’s life, there are conflicting stories about the excessiveness and regularity of his drinking, even during his college years. Letters from Poe’s lifetime show that alcohol occasionally affected his professional life, yet he also went long periods of time, including years, without touching a drink.
The Raven’s Tale ends in May 1827, when Poe first embarked upon his career as a published author at the age of eighteen. His debut book of poetry, Tamerlane and Other Poems, appeared in print around June or July of 1827. As I showed in the novel, another eighteen-year-old from Virginia, Calvin F. S. Thomas, printed Poe’s small pamphlet of poetry in Boston, Massachusetts. The August 1827 issue of The United States Review and Literary Gazette in Boston mentioned the book, and The North American Review printed a notice about the poetry collection in October 1827. No reviews of Tamerlane and Other Poems appeared in any publications, however, and fewer than forty copies of the book may have been printed, of which only about twelve have survived, according to the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore (www.eapoe.org).
Poe’s burgeoning Gothic muse and his interest in the subject of death as a theme for his writings can be seen in such early poems as “The Lake” and “Visit of the Dead” (the latter of which he later renamed “Spirits of the Dead”), both published in Tamerlane and Other Poems. Modern readers often think of Poe as solely a writer of macabre stories and poetry, but throughout his career he also published humorous, satirical, and scientific pieces, among other styles of writings. Poe showed off his satirical side in one of his earliest surviving compositions, “Oh, Tempora! Oh, Mores!,” a poem that ridiculed a clerk named Robert Pitts, written in approximately 1825 when Poe was sixteen. He also gained notoriety as a ruthlessly blunt literary critic, starting in 1835 when the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond hired him to work on the periodical.
In that same year the Southern Literary Messenger published Poe’s early horror story “Berenice,” the tale of a man so obsessed with the teeth of his beloved, Berenice, that upon her death, he disturbs her grave and removes the teeth from her body before learning that she was mistakenly buried alive. “Berenice” horrified readers, and hate mail followed. In a letter written to the Southern Literary Messenger’s editor, Thomas Willis White, on April 30, 1835, Poe responded to the public’s repulsion, acknowledging that his story was “far too horrible” and that the nature of the tale was considered to be in “bad taste.” In Chapter Four of The Raven’s Tale, I intentionally inserted those very words of Poe’s in the form of the public’s initial reaction to Lenore in Richmond. In fact, throughout The Raven’s Tale, whenever people criticize Lenore and Poe’s Gothic writings, they’re often using short phrases I pulled from nineteenth-century reviews of Poe’s works, including such terms as “sickly rhymes” (Willis, N. P., American Monthly Magazine, November 1829), “execrably bad” (Daniel, John Moncure, Southern Literary Messenger, Vol. XVI, No. 3, March 1850, pp. 172–187), “exquisite nonsense” (Neal, John, ed., The Yankee and Boston Literary Gazette, New Series, July–December, 1829), and “a gem of art” (Richmond Semi-Weekly Examiner, Vol. II, No. 93, September 25, 1849, p. 2, col. 4–5).
Poe’s poetry flows throughout The Raven’s Tale, as well as some of my own humble attempts at verses written in Poe’s style. Please refer to the section “Poems, Songs, Letters, and Stories Quoted in The Raven’s Tale” for my notes on the poems in the novel.
Because I ended the novel shortly after eighteen-year-old Edgar Poe moved out of the house of the family that raised him, I’m aware that readers may have questions about the fates of the Allans and other real-life individuals close to Poe during his youth.
Frances Keeling Valentine Allan, Poe’s foster mother, who by all accounts, loved him dearly, died on February 28, 1829, “after a lingering and painful illness” (Richmond Whig, March 2, 1829). Her death brought a brief reconciliation between Poe, now twenty, and his foster father, John Allan, but that bond deteriorated once more when Poe left the U.S. Army in 1829 to further pursue his writing career. He did please Allan by serving a brief, albeit unhappy stint at West Point that began in 1830, but he was court-martialed and dismissed for neglecting his duties in February 1831.
Poe and John Allan’s relationship further suffered when Poe wrote in a May 1830 letter to Sergeant Samuel Graves, a soldier whom Poe paid to serve as his substitute in the Army, that “Mr. A[llan] is not very often sober.” Poe’s unflattering words about his foster father found their way back to John Allan, who told Poe he was ending their relationship.
I found Poe’s list of expenses for the University of Virginia and his claim that Allan sent him to college with only $110 in a letter Poe wrote to Allan from West Point in January 1831. Even though Allan’s correspondence to family and friends during Poe’s childhood convey his affection for the boy, evidence of the burgeoning dysfunction between father and son exists as far back as a letter Allan wrote to Poe’s brother, Henry, in November 1824, in which Allan said of fifteen-year-old Edgar, “he does nothing & seems quite miserable, sulky & ill-tempered to all the Family.” John Allan remarried in October 1830 and died in March 1834, leaving behind his new wife, Louisa Patterson Allan, and their three young sons. In his will, he bequeathed nothing to his foster son, but he provided money for twin sons he fathered with a Richmond widow named Elizabeth Wills in July 1830. I acknowledge that most of the surviving letters give Poe’s side of their conflict and not John Allan’s.
Poe’s first fiancée, Sarah Elmira Royster, married Alexander Shelton in 1828, and the couple had four children together, but only two lived to adulthood. Alexander died in 1844. Edgar and Elmira eventually reunited in Richmond and became engaged again in 1849, two and a half years after the death of Poe’s wife (and first cousin), Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe, and shortly before Poe’s death. They never married. Sarah Elmira Royster Shelton died in February 1888, and by all accounts generally shunned the publicity that followed her over her relationship with Edgar Allan Poe.
Poe’s younger sister, Rosalie Mackenzie Poe, born circa December 1810, lived most of her years with the Mackenzie family that took her in after the death of their mother. Some records portray her as having the intellect of a child all her life. Others show her as a woman who played the piano, wrote poetry, and worked as an instructor at the Mackenzie School for Girls in Richmond. After Rosalie’s foster mother died in 1865, Rosalie became destitute and eventually tried earning money by selling items she claimed to have belonged to her famous, deceased brother, as well as photographs of him. She died in a charity home in Washington, DC, in 1874 at the age of sixty-four.
Various scholars list Judith, Dabney, and “Old Jim” as the names of the slaves that served in the Allan household. Confusion exists with Judith’s name, however. Some receipts list “Juliet” or “Eudocia” instead. She joined the Allans in January 1811, and according to various books and articles, she likely played a significant role in inspiring young Edgar Allan Poe’s supernatural interests.
Edgar’s older brother, William Henry Leonard Poe—also a published author—died in 1831 at the age of twenty-four.
Edgar’s Richmond friend Ebenezer Burling died of cholera in 1832 at the age of twenty-five.
In the 1860s and 1880s, Poe’s university friends Miles George, William M. Burwell, and the librarian William Wertenbaker all left behind remembrances of their time spent with the renowned author. I based many of the University of Virginia chapters on their recollections. Miles George’s use of the words “superabundant talent” to describe Poe’s gifts in Chapter Twenty-Seven are from George’s letter “Reminiscence of Poe” (State, May 22, 1880, p. 2).
Poe’s college friend Upton Beall, despite his reputation as a skilled card player at the University of Virginia, went on to graduate from the Virginia Theological Seminary in 1837 and became the rector of Christ Church in Norfolk, Virginia.
Edgar Allan Poe made a significant impact on the world of literature in the twenty-two years following the publication of Tamerlane and Other Poems. During his lifetime, he gained his greatest fame for his dark and lyrical poem “The Raven,” which debuted in 1845, but Poe has also been credited with inventing the detective fiction genre and contributing to the growth of science fiction. He wrote dozens of poems and short stories (scholars disagree on the exact number), as well as a novel, a play, essays, and the aforementioned critical reviews. He died in Baltimore, Maryland, at the age of forty on October 7, 1849. To this date the cause of his death, in pure Poe style, remains a mystery.
For a complete picture of the life of Edgar Allan Poe, including details about his marriage, his career, and his enigmatic death, please see my “Further Reading” section, which features books, articles, and websites that proved invaluable to me while writing The Raven’s Tale. I take full responsibility for any inaccuracies or anachronisms found in the novel, and I must beg the reader’s pardon for committing any such errors.