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decline of religious authority, the development and secularization of mass culture, and the advent of modern scientific skepticism, Poe (in the words of Sarah Helen Whitman) “came to sound the very depths of the abyss,” articulating in his tales and poems “the unrest and faithlessness of the age.” As compellingly as any writer of his time, Poe intuited the spiritual void opening in an era dominated by a secular, scientific understanding of life and death. If Kierkegaard analyzed philosophically the condition of dread that accompanied the “sickness unto death,” Poe gave memorable literary expression to modern doubt and death anxiety. His Eureka may be seen as a late, desperate effort to construct from the laws of physics—from the implacable materiality of science itself—a theory of spiritual survival. In his most stunning poetry and fiction he staged the dilemma of the desolate self, confronting its own mortality and beset by uncertainties about a spiritual afterlife.
    Thanks in part to Reverend Rufus Griswold, the nemesis whom the author perversely designated as his literary executor, Poe’s posthumous reputation was originally clouded by moral condemnation. Griswold’s notorious obituary, recast as a preface to the otherwise reliable edition of Poe’s works he supervised in the 1850s, acknowledged his contemporary’s genius but also portrayed him as a morbid loner, a drunken lunatic wandering the streets muttering “curses and imprecations.” Poe’s early defenders included George Graham and N. P. Willis as well as Mrs. Whitman, who in 1860 issued Edgar Poe and His Critics, an acute estimate of his lasting significance. The publication of a multivolume edition of his works in French by Baudelaire established his fame abroad and made Poe the patron saint of the symbolist movement. Later in the nineteenth century John H. Ingram and George Wood-berry wrote pioneering biographies, and as the twentieth century began, James A. Harrison produced the first scholarly edition of Poe’s collected writings. During the twentieth century, new biographies by Arthur Hobson Quinn and more recently by Kenneth Silverman have incorporated fresh information and critical perspectives. John Ward Ostrom’s edition of Poe’s letters, and the compilation of the Poe Log by David K. Jackson and Dwight Thomas, as well as the definitive edition of Poe’s collected writings by T. O. Mabbott and Burton R. Pollin, have marked important milestones in scholarship, while critical studies of the past seventy-five years have enriched and complicated the appraisal of Poe’s work. Derogation of Poe’s achievements by such luminaries as Henry James, T. S. Eliot, and Aldous Huxley as well as Poe’s exclusion from several studies of the so-called American renaissance have underscored his problematic status. Yet he remains irresistibly compelling, the undying appeal of his strange tales and poems testifying to his enduring international significance.

Chronology
    1809 Born in Boston to actors David Poe and Elizabeth Arnold Poe. Father born in Baltimore, son of Irish-born emigrant David Poe, Sr., American quartermaster during the Revolutionary War. English-born mother came to United States in 1796; wedded David Poe in 1805. Older brother William Henry Leonard Poe born in 1807.
    1811 Mother dies of tuberculosis in Richmond, one year after birth of daughter, Rosalie. Father had abandoned family; likely died of tuberculosis in 1811. Richmond merchant John Allan and wife Frances become foster parents of Edgar; grandparents in Baltimore care for brother Henry, while Mackenzie family of Richmond welcomes Rosalie.
    1815 Accompanies John and Frances Allan to England, where Allan opens a branch of his mercantile firm, Ellis and Allan, in London. Edgar visits Allan family relatives in Scotland and the following year enters boarding school in London as “Edgar Allan.”
    1816 Paternal grandfather David Poe, Sr., dies in Baltimore.
    1818 Enters