Always in debt, Poe both sought and sneered at the popular audience of his day. Illustration by AndrÉ Carrilho

Edgar Allan Poe once wrote an essay called “The Philosophy of Composition,” to explain why he wrote “The Raven” backward. The poem tells the story of a man who, “once upon a midnight dreary,” while mourning his dead love, Lenore, answers a tapping at his chamber door, to find “darkness there and nothing more.” He peers into the darkness, “dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before,” and meets a silence broken only by his whispered word, “Lenore?” He closes the door. The tapping starts again. He flings open his shutter and, “with many a flirt and flutter,” in flies a raven, “grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore.” The bird speaks just one word: “Nevermore.” That word is the poem’s last, but it’s where Poe began. He started, he said, “at the end, where all works of art should begin,” and he “first put pen to paper” at what became the third-to-last stanza:

“Prophet,” said I, “thing of evil! prophet still if bird or devil! By that heaven that bends above us—by that God we both adore, Tell this soul with sorrow laden, if within the distant Aidenn, It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore— Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.” Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

“The Philosophy of Composition” is a lovely little essay, but, as Poe himself admitted, it’s a bit of jiggery-pokery, too. Poe didn’t actually write “The Raven” backward. The essay is as much a contrivance as the poem itself. Here is a beautiful poem; it does everything a poem should do, is everything a poem should be. And here is a clever essay about the writing of a beautiful poem. Top that. Nearly everything Poe wrote, including the spooky stories for which he is best remembered, has this virtuosic, showy, lilting, and slightly wilting quality, like a peony just past bloom. Poe didn’t write “The Raven” to answer the exacting demands of a philosophic Art, or not entirely, anyway. He wrote it for the same reason that he wrote tales like “The Gold-Bug”: to stave off starvation. For a long while, Poe lived on bread and molasses; weeks before “The Gold-Bug” was published, he was begging near-strangers on the street for fifty cents to buy something to eat. “ ‘The Raven’ has had a great ‘run,’ ” he wrote to a friend, “but I wrote it for the express purpose of running—just as I did the ‘Gold-Bug,’ you know. The bird beat the bug, though, all hollow.” The public that swallowed that bird and bug Poe strenuously resented. You love Poe or you don’t, but, either way, Poe doesn’t love you. A writer more condescending to more adoring readers would be hard to find. “The nose of a mob is its imagination,” he wrote. “By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.”

This year marks the two-hundredth anniversary of Poe’s birth and the publication of two collections of gothic tales produced by the Mystery Writers of America. “On a Raven’s Wing: New Tales in Honor of Edgar Allan Poe” (Harper; $14.99) contains stories by twenty mystery writers, including Mary Higgins Clark. “In the Shadow of the Master: Classic Tales by Edgar Allan Poe” (William Morrow; $25.99) pairs Poe’s best-known stories with modern commentaries; Stephen King muses on “The Genius of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart.’ ” There’s also a sensitive and haunting brief biography, Peter Ackroyd’s “Poe: A Life Cut Short” (Doubleday; $21.95), that offers a fitting tribute to Poe’s begin-at-the-end philosophy by opening with his horrible and mysterious death, in October of 1849. Poe, drunk and delirious, seems to have been dragged around Baltimore to cast votes, precinct after precinct, in one of that city’s infamously corrupt congressional elections, until he finally collapsed. From Ryan’s tavern, a polling place in the Fourth Ward, Poe was carried, like a corpse, to a hospital. He died four days later. He was forty years old.

“My whole existence has been the merest Romance,” Poe wrote, the year before his death, “in the sense of the most utter unworldliness.” This is Byronic bunk. Poe’s life was tragic, but he was about as unworldly as a bale of cotton. Poe’s world was Andrew Jackson’s America, a world of banking collapse, financial panic, and grinding depression that had a particularly devastating effect on the publishing industry, where Poe sought a perch. His biography really is a series of unfortunate events. But two of those events were transatlantic financial crises: the Panic of 1819 and the Panic of 1837, the pit and the pendulum of the antebellum economy. Poe died at the end of a decade known, in Europe, as “the Hungry Forties,” and he wasn’t the only American to fall face down in the gutter during a seven-year-long depression brought on by a credit collapse. He did not live out of time. He lived in hard times, dark times, up-and-down times. Indigence cast a shadow over everything he attempted. Poverty was his raven, tapping at the door, and it was Poe, not the bird, who uttered, helplessly, another rhyme for “Nevermore.” “I send you an original tale,” Poe once began a letter, and, at its end, added one line more: “P.S. I am poor.”

Edgar Poe was born in Boston, on January 19, 1809, to a talented actress named Eliza Poe and her hapless husband, David, who deserted her. When Edgar was two, his mother died of consumption. Edgar and a brother and sister had little more to depend upon than the charity of strangers. The Poe orphans were separated, and Edgar landed in the home of a wealthy Richmond merchant named John Allan and his sickly, childless wife, Fanny. Allan, who ran a firm called the House of Ellis, never adopted the boy, and never loved him, either. Poe, for his part, took Allan’s name but never wanted it. (He signed letters, and published, as “Edgar A. Poe.”) In 1815, Allan moved his family to London, to take advantage of the booming British market for Virginia tobacco. Poe attended posh boarding schools. Then, during the Panic of 1819, the first bust in the industrializing nineteenth century, banks failed, factories closed, and Allan’s business imploded. Allan, plagued with two hundred thousand dollars of debt, returned to Virginia. Poe turned poet. The earliest verses in his hand that survive were written when he was fifteen: “Last night, with many cares and toils oppress’d, / Weary, I laid me on a couch to rest.” Adolescent melancholy, and nothing more. But on the same sheet of paper, just below Poe’s scrawl, Allan had calculated the compound interest on a debt.

In 1823, Poe fell in love with Jane Stannard, the unhinged mother of a school friend. A year later, Stannard died, insane. Poe spent much time at her graveside. “No more” became his favorite phrase. In 1825, Allan inherited a fortune from an uncle. He did not name Poe as his heir. Allan rose; Poe kept falling. At seventeen, Poe went to the University of Virginia, where he drank and gambled and, in a matter of months, racked up debts totalling more than two thousand dollars. Allan refused to honor them, even though Poe was at risk of debtors’ prison. Poe ran off. There followed a series of huffy pronouncements and stormy departures; most ended in Poe creeping back, begging Allan for money. “I am in the greatest necessity, not having tasted food since Yesterday morning,” Poe wrote. “I have no where to sleep at night, but roam about the Streets.” Allan was unmoved. Poe enlisted in the Army and served for two years as Edgar A. Perry. In 1829, Fanny Allan died. Andrew Jackson was inaugurated. Poe, while awaiting a commission to West Point, submitted the manuscript for a book of poems to a publisher, who told him that he would publish it only if Poe guaranteed him against the loss. Allan wouldn’t front the money. Poe moved to Baltimore, where he lived with his invalid grandmother; his aunt, Maria Clemm; his nine-year-old cousin, Virginia; and his brother, Henry, an alcoholic who was dying of consumption.

Jackson, meanwhile, refused to renew the charter of the Bank of the United States, run by Nicholas Biddle. Biddle insisted on the need for federal regulation of paper currency. Some of Jackson’s supporters wanted no paper money at all. Between 1830 and 1837, while Biddle and Jackson battled, three hundred and forty-seven state-chartered banks opened across the country. They printed their own money—$140 million in paper bills was in circulation by 1836. All this paper was backed by very little coin. At the end of Jackson’s two terms, American banks held six times as much paper money as gold.

Poe, who was broke, didn’t need a bank. He could treasure up funds, he came to believe, in his own brain. He read as much as he could, borrowing books from Baltimore libraries. “There are minds which not only retain all receipts, but keep them at compound interest for ever,” he wrote. Poe may have thought that his mind was a mint, but when his book of poems was finally published it earned him nothing (exactly what all his collections of poetry earned). He sold one of Maria Clemm’s slaves. “I have tried to get the money for you from Mr. A a dozen times—but he always shuffles me off,” Poe wrote to one of his creditors. And he added, lying, “Mr. A is not very often sober.”

“I have an inveterate habit of speaking the truth,” Poe once wrote. That, too, was a lie. (That Poe lied compulsively about his own life has proved the undoing of many a biographer.) In 1830, he finally made it to West Point, where he pulled pranks. “I cannot believe a word he writes,” Allan wrote on the back of yet another letter from his wayward charge. Poe was court-martialled, and after that Allan, who had since married a woman twenty years his junior, cut him off entirely. Poe went to New York, but, unable to support himself by writing, he left the city within three months, returning to Baltimore to live with Mrs. Clemm and little Virginia. He published his first story, “Metzengerstein,” about a doomed Hungarian baron, his gloomy castle, and his fiery steed. He won a prize of fifty dollars from the Baltimore Saturday Visiter for “MS Found in a Bottle.” One of the editors, who met him, later wrote, “I found him in Baltimore in a state of starvation.” In these straits, Poe wrote “Berenice,” a story about a man who disinters his dead lover and yanks out all her teeth—“the white and glistening, and ghastly teeth of Berenice”—only to realize that she is still alive. It has been claimed, plausibly, that Poe wrote this story to make a very bad and long-winded joke about “bad taste.” Also: he was hungry.

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John Allan died in 1834, a rich man. He left his vast estate—three plantations and two hundred and thirty slaves—to his second wife and their three children. He left Edgar A. Poe not a penny. The following year, Poe was hired as the editor of a new monthly magazine, the Southern Literary Messenger, in Richmond. He was paid sixty dollars a month, modest enough but, for him, a fortune. In 1836, Poe married Virginia Clemm. She was thirteen; he was twenty-seven; he said she was twenty-one. He called her his “darling little wifey.” (“I was a child and she was a child, / In this kingdom by the sea; / But we loved with a love that was more than love— / I and my Annabel Lee.”) Poe held the job at the Messenger for only sixteen months. He boasted that, under his editorship, the magazine’s circulation grew from seven hundred to fifty-five hundred, but, as the Poe scholar Terence Whalen has discovered, this was another lie. The magazine had thirteen hundred subscribers when Poe started, and eighteen hundred when he left.

Poe lied about the Messenger’s circulation because he was attempting to forge a career in the world of magazine publishing during very troubled economic times. And, plainly, he was a very troubled man. Quarrelling with the publisher of the Messenger, Poe left the magazine and, in February of 1837, moved to New York. The New-Yorker, a weekly magazine edited by Rufus Griswold, welcomed him, praising his work at the Messenger. Harper & Brothers was just about to publish his novel, “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” the account of a Nantucket seafarer. His voyages involve whaling, mutiny, shipwreck, sharks, cannibalism, letters written in blood, cryptic “Ethiopian characters,” and an island of treacherous black people, with black teeth, whose chief is named Too-wit.

Unfortunately, Poe arrived in New York just in time for the Panic of 1837. With all that paper money, speculators had gone wild; in the West, there had been a land grab and in the East a housing bubble—in New York, real-estate values had risen a hundred and fifty per cent. When the crash came, early in the Van Buren Presidency, bankruptcies swept the nation. In New York, riots erupted as the swelling ranks of the city’s poor broke into food shops. “Down with the panic makers,” one newspaper warned, promising, “A bright sun will soon dispel the remaining darkness.” But the skies didn’t brighten. In April, one New Yorker wrote in his diary, “Wall Street. The blackness of darkness still hangeth over it. Failure on failure.” By the fall of 1837, nine out of ten Eastern factories had closed. Five hundred desperate New Yorkers turned up to answer an ad for twenty day laborers, to be paid at the truly measly wage of four dollars a month.

“Pym” failed, too. Poe’s publisher had tried to pass the novel off as an authentic travel journal even as its author left a trail of clues to the hoax—“pym” being, for instance, an anagram of “imp.” This didn’t go over especially well. One reviewer called the book “an impudent attempt at humbugging the public.” Poe did not write another novel. He moved to Philadelphia and wrote more short stories. During the seven-year depression that followed the Panic, Whalen has shown, Poe wrote a tenth as many poems and twice as many tales. He insisted that this was an aesthetic choice. Any piece of truly worthy writing must be able to be read at a sitting in order to achieve a single dramatic effect, the “Nevermore”-ish end with which, Poe said, every work of Art must begin. The tale, he believed, affords “the best prose opportunity for display of the highest talent.” Maybe. But writing a book was exactly the kind of long-term investment Poe could not afford to make, especially with so little prospect of return. In the eighteen-twenties, books cost, on average, two dollars; during the depression, that price fell to fifty cents.