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How to Talk About Murder: Edgar Allan Poe's stories are full of ghastly crimes
In the summer of 1841, Edgar Allan Poe was a man on the rise. At the age of thirty-two, he was living in Philadelphia, where he worked as an editor at Graham’s magazine. Back then, Philadelphia was the magazine-publishing capital of the United States, and Graham’s was one of the nation’s most important illustrated monthlies. With a peak circulation of forty thousand—enormous for its time—Graham’s included tales, light essays, colored fashion plates, and reviews. As a literary editor, Poe provided reviews and, for an extra fee, tales as well.
In those days, Poe was a respected reviewer and a fiction writer of growing reputation. He had published three poetry collections of small circulation, as well as a sea novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838). His first collection of stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, had come out in 1839.
Although Poe was a sought-after writer, it was not easy for him to make money. The idea that writing was a profession from which one could make a living was still new. It would not have seemed unusual to Poe’s contemporaries that the publishers of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque retained all profits from the seven hundred and fifty copies they printed. Poe got to keep the copyright and twenty free copies. Graham’s was one of the first places to compensate its editors and contributors well, and magazine publishing in general was beginning to pay better than book publishing. Poe had set his sights on magazine work.
Reaching the relative eminence of Graham’s staff had not been easy. Orphaned at a young age, Poe had been raised in Richmond, Virginia, by a foster father who later disinherited him. Thrown back on his own resources, Poe struggled. At times, he was so impoverished that he could not clothe himself. Before he finally got into the magazine business, his checkered career included stints as a common soldier, as a student at West Point, and (rumor has it) as a bricklayer. Editing suited him better than other work he had tried, but even so, Poe was prone to imperiling his previous magazine positions through self-sabotage—and drinking. Now, at Graham’s, Poe had a steady job and a promising future. His friends must have been praying he’d be able to keep it.
But Poe grew restless. He wanted to found his own magazine, as he had tried and failed to do before taking the job at Graham’s, a magazine he considered middlebrow. He particularly detested its fashion illustrations. In April 1842, after working at Graham’s for a little over a year, he quit, then carefully choreographed the launch of a new magazine he called The Stylus. By early 1843, he had secured a partner with capital to invest and had arranged for a lengthy biography of himself and a prospectus of The Stylus to run in the Philadelphia Saturday Museum, a local newspaper.
The biography used truths, half truths, and lies to paint Poe as a poetic genius, an entrepreneur, and an athlete. Poe either wrote the biography himself or closely supervised its writing; his fingerprints are all over its most colorful incidents, such as a Byronic voyage to Greece to fight in the revolution (a fabrication) and a six-mile swim in the James River as a teenager (a true event and, as Poe or his ringer wrote, longer than Lord Byron’s more famous “paddle” across the Hellespont). The biography also exaggerated Poe’s magic touch as a periodicals editor. It claimed that he had drastically increased the circulation of The Southern Literary Messenger, a Richmond-based magazine where he had previously worked. This wasn’t true; the scholar Terence Whalen has shown that Poe was “essentially an irrelevant variable” when it came to the Messenger’s circulation. But Poe wanted to paint himself as a man with as much business acumen as taste, the ideal editor for the new Stylus. The piece concluded with a bulleted list of glowing blurbs on Poe from Nathaniel Hawthorne and other well-known authors, some of which came from private letters.