Edgar Allan Poe's Philadelphia: The Decade That Made the Horror

Edgar Allan Poe arrived in Philadelphia in eighteen thirty-eight with a wife, a mother-in-law, and almost no money. He was twenty-nine years old and had published two books of poetry that had sold almost nothing. What he had was a capacity for imagining the precise texture of dread.

Philadelphia was the best city in the country for a literary journalist in the eighteen thirties. The publishing industry was centered here, the magazines paid better than anywhere else, and editors were hungry for the kind of fiction that could hold a reader through a long winter evening. Poe found his footing.

Between eighteen thirty-eight and eighteen forty-four, the six years he spent in Philadelphia, he wrote nearly everything he is remembered for. The Fall of the House of Usher appeared in eighteen thirty-nine. The Murders in the Rue Morgue, the first modern detective story, in eighteen forty-one. The Masque of the Red Death in eighteen forty-two. The Tell-Tale Heart in eighteen forty-three. He was editing Graham's Magazine during this period at a salary of eight hundred dollars per year, the best income of his adult life, and contributing to Burton's Gentleman's Magazine before that.

His wife, Virginia Clemm, whom he had married when she was thirteen and he was twenty-seven, began showing symptoms of tuberculosis sometime around eighteen forty-two. The disease that would kill her in eighteen forty-seven announced itself during the years Poe was writing stories about premature burial, physical deterioration, and the slow approach of death that the victim cannot prevent.

The small brick house on North Seventh Street where he lived with Virginia and her mother, Maria Clemm, is the only surviving Poe Philadelphia residence. It is now a National Historic Site managed by the National Park Service. The rooms are plain. The walls are thin. He sat in this house and wrote the stories that made terror into an American literary form.