Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe possessed a personality which contained many examples of a contrary nature. He was dismissive of authority and in his youth considered rules to be an inconvenience best ignored. As a first year student at the University of Virginia, then only in its second year of existence, he was confronted with the code of the University, established with the guidance and approval of Thomas Jefferson. Students were not supposed to indulge in gambling, alcohol, and other perceived vices. Poe left within a year, unable financially to complete his studies due to excessive gambling debts.
After a stint in the army as an enlisted man under a false name, Poe traveled to West Point to enter the Military Academy to obtain an education and a commission as an officer in the US Army. He became a cadet in July 1830. By the fall of 1830, because of personal problems with his foster father John Allan and other issues, he decided to get himself thrown out of the academy, a plan at which he was successful by February 1831. Poe had by then already published two books of poetry and a third, written while at West Point and financed with the help of his classmates there was published shortly thereafter, dedicated to the cadets.
Poe was the first American writer to try to support himself entirely through writing, and he did all that he could do make it more difficult for himself. Any writer surely realizes the need to maintain a positive and constructive relationship with his editors, and the inadvisability of deliberately angering them. Poe developed the habit of working with scrolls, connecting pages of handwritten material at their ends with sealing wax, and submitting the material in a roll, rather than in a leafed manuscript. Some were dozens of feet long, irritating his editors, which was one of the reasons Poe chose to do it in the first place.
Poe also wrote stories which were deliberate hoaxes, others which were deliberately provocative, and as a literary critic, he developed the reputation among some of being what would today be called a “hatchet man.” His personal reputation in the United States led to him being shunned in American literary circles and as a result his work achieved a higher level of success in Europe than in the United States.
Poe spent his life attracting admirers and enemies, achieving critical success and heavy debts, creating a new literary genre – the detective story, and contributing to the end of another – poetry in the style of Longfellow. Even his death remains a matter of speculation, like his life parts of it remain unexplained though of a seedy nature.
