THE MODERN STUDENT'S LIBRARY EACH VOLUME EDITED BY A LEADING This series is composed of such works as are conspicuous in the province of literature for their enduring influence. Every volume is recognized as essential to a liberal education and will tend to infuse a love for true literature and an appreciation of the qualities which cause it to endure. A descriptive list of the volumes published in this series appears in the last pages of this volume CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS OF EDGAR ALLAN POE EDITED BY JAMES SOUTHALL WILSON Edgar Allan Poe Professor of English grad 32261470 gigen 1/12/00 add copy INTRODUCTION I IT IS difficult to arrive at the truth about the circumstances of the life of Edgar Allan Poe because on the one hand his personality and strange genius awaken antagonism, conscious and unconscious, in those who write about him and on the other his apologists have suppressed part of the truth or glossed over the man's all too obvious failings. A tangle of literary gossip, a fog of sentimentalism and prejudices, shut us out from approach to the man himself. It is more difficult to escape the unsubstantiated traditions than it is to find the definitely established facts. Poe (who did not always tell the simple truth about himself) correctly gave the date of his birth to the official who entered his name on the matriculation book of the University of Virginia as January 19, 1809. His parents had been acting in Boston and there he was born. His mother, the daughter of an English actress, was Elizabeth Arnold and had married the young Baltimorean, David Poe, after the death of her first husband, C. D. Hopkins, who had been a member of the company with which the Poes acted. David Poe, son of David Poe of Maryland, came of Irish stock. He had disappointed his family by leaving a law office for the stage. He died either just before or just after his wife, but the date or place is not actually known. Poe's mother, Elizabeth Arnold Poe, died after a pathetic struggle with disease, amid circumstances of tragic poverty on December 8, 1811, in Richmond, Virginia. Of the three children left, William Henry Leonard |