You Have Self-Published—Congratulations. Now What? Shockingly, Purple Potato Press in your garage stands just as much chance of hitting it big with My Fair Novel than Anaconda Publishing Cartel in Manhattan does with Hype & Mirrors…

Edgar Allan Poe, Author & Self-Publisher. This is a picture of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) when he was young and healthy. As with D. H. Lawrence, we usually see photos of Poe when he was thin, sallow, and dark-eyed near death's door. That adds to the Dead Poets mystique, favored by literati, but the fact is that very few artists or authors ever starved in garrets. A vast number self-published, led interesting lives, and became smashing bestsellers in their day, despite the loathing of the establishment and the literati of the time. In a sense, the Dead Poet is a legacy handed, like job security, from one generation of critics, academics, and hype-marketers to the next. For an alternative and more realistic view of Edgar Allan Poe, visit the Poe Museum online. Poe, we must sadly observe, never lived to realize the vast literary legacy he had created.

Poe did not live long enough to enjoy his smashing literary success, which influenced generations of famous authors on both sides of the Atlantic. Like Philip K. Dick, he lived in poverty all of his life. He published and was published, achieving late (1845) fame with his poem The Raven. Growing up, he was robbed (financially) by some relatives and supported by others. He enlisted in the U.S. Army, starting as a private, and attaining the top enlisted rank of sergeant major in less than five years. He became a student at the U.S. Military Academy (West Point) but got himself expelled for two reasons: (a) to spite his domineering, sometimes cruel adoptive father John Allan; and (b) because his poverty led him to gambling, even to burn his furniture for firewood to stay alive.

The Morbid Century It is important to remember that, until the 20th Century, early morbidity was a constant reality in even the industrialized nations of the world. The primary example is that of Queen Victoria, who lost her beloved young husband, Prince Albert, who was 42 when he died in 1861. The immediate cause was given as typhoid fever, attributed to ignorance about sanitation in the otherwise fabulous royal palaces. Queen Victoria cast the entire world in mourning for forty years, until her death in 1901. I cover this era in an extended epilog to my novel (1892 period noir thriller) Lethal Journey based on the true story of the woman who became the famous ghost at the Hotel del Coronado near San Diego. I also wrote extensively about this in the non-fictional, scholarly analysis Dead Move: Kate Morgan and the Haunting Mystery of Coronado, Second Edition (Nonfiction), on which Lethal Journey is based. The age, haunted by the dying of the feudal age with its castles and ruined cloisters, and beset with the new diseases, crime, and other urban horrors of the Industrial Revolution, was morbid before Queen Victoria put her quintessential dark signature on it. Few individuals reached the key stature of Edgar Allan Poe in exemplifying the age. Remember, this was the century in which both Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1816) and Bram Stoker's (1847-1912) Dracula (1897) came into their own. Mary Shelley (1797-1851) lived a tragic life, whose dark moments included the loss of children and her young husband Percy Bysshe Shelley. By the way, 1816 is still notorious today as the Year Without a Summer. The explosion of the enormous volcano Tambora in the Pacific in 1815—the largest volcanic eruption in well over 1,000 years—shrouded the world in a cold haze that caused crop failures and famines around the world. The Year Without a Summer was the setting for the rainy, dismal summer night at the Villa Diodati near Geneva in 1816, when, on a story-telling gambit proposed by their host, Lord Byron, Mary introduced to the world the notorious Frankenstein. On that same evening, Byron's young physician John Polidori (who would commit suicide a few years later at 26), introduced the modern vampire as literary character in the form of Lord Ruthven, a predecessor of Bram Stoker's Dracula. A final point on this depressing century is that, aside from the morbidity and mortality, the English-speaking world was in the steel grip of the English state religion, which imposed a neo-Gothic circus of black clothing, sexual denial, and puritanical enforcement of morays gone industrially and institutionally overboard, and saturating every cranny of personal and public life across the Commonwealth and the United States. It was the age of the Fallen Angel (described in Lethal Journey and Dead Move), as epitomized by Thomas Hardy's Tess d'Urberville. That theme is found in the writings of every prominent author, composer, and artist of the age. Mary Shelley, for example, fell in love at 17 with one of her father's outspoken (and married) political fellow-essayists, Percy Shelley. They fled to Europe for a great tour (not the standard Grand Tour of Popish lands filled with ancient monuments and craven people, as denounced and persecuted by the Anglican 'vatican' in London) that resulted in Frankenstein. She was pregnant, 'ruined,' and ostracized. The Shelleys were a scandal to all British society, deeply in debt, and ostracized at every turn. That is the atmosphere, in general, in which we must digest the truths about Edgar Allan Poe (baptized Episcopalian, the U.S. branch of the Commonwealth's Anglican confession, whose head is the King or Queen of England). As morbid as Edgar may seem in retrospect, in an age beset by hardship and early death, his only real anomaly was the genius of his writing. But the images we know best—of a sallow, sickly man with huge, haunted eyes like black caves filled with misery and melancholy—is largely false. Poe was not a murderer (as has lately been proposed), nor was he one of the demonic creatures of his darkest stories. He was a brilliant young man who led a real life, full of ups and downs, whose distilled essence remains in his poems and stories. So where do we get the frightening images of him as a drug and alcohol besotted monster found delirious and near death on Baltimore streets? The answer is Rufus Griswold, of whom more in a moment.

Lost, Beautiful Young Love During his life, Edgar Allan Poe loved and lost several times. Along with his genius, he was very human and frail in several ways. He was not the monster portrayed by his enemies, but no angel either. One of his signature themes became the death of a beautiful, beloved woman. In real life, at age he married his lovely 13-year-old cousin Virginia Clemm, who died young of tuberculosis. It appears that Poe was subject to human frailties even in his love life. One school of thought that Edgar and Virginia lived Platonically. He did have at least one publicly glaring affair that embittered her toward him. On her deathbed, she claimed that, through his infidelity, he had 'killed me.' She was the last and greatest inspiration for his recurring theme of the beautiful, lost lover-woman typified in Ulalume, Ligeia, and other stories and poems of heart-breaking love and loss—or, perhaps, Virginia simply personified the deep melancholia in Poe's soul, which led him to imagine such immortal tales as The Fall of the House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, and The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Virginia died two years before Edgar (1847 to his 1849). His last two years consisted of months of rapid decline in his health.

Dark Legend Poe as tortured artist and dark genius may serve the fantasies and economic opportunities of some modern readers, but it is not an accurate picture. The major portion of his mythology was woven by one of his most bitter and vicious enemies, a competitor named Rufus Wilmot Griswold (1815-1857) who is all but forgotten today. Griswold, like Poe, led a precarious literary life. He moved around a lot, like Poe, in pursuit of small incomes here and there. Griswold was married three times, and involved in several scandals that made him far more notorious than the relatively unknown Poe. Griswold's contemporary reputation, long forgotten, rested on a definitive 1842 anthology of U.S. poets. He included Poe in this anthology, but Poe wrote a scathing review, questioning some of Griswold's choices. The two became bitter enemies for the rest of their short lives. After Virginia died, Poe slipped into a remaining two years of alcoholism and growing incapacity. Nobody knows what actually killed Poe, and we will probably never know for sure. Especially after Virginia's death in 1847, Poe's alcoholism intensified. It helped ruin his health over his last two years, and contributed to his early death. The immediate cause of his death may have been something as routine, for the times, as typhoid fever. He kept calling out the name Reynolds, whose meaning remains cryptic and unknown. Poe died four days later, at Washington College Hospital, on the morning of Sunday, 7 October 1849. Immediately, his nemesis Griswold declared himself (unfoundedly) to be Poe's executor. Griswold circulated an obituary that was calculated to ruin Poe's reputation. He painted an image of Poe as a depraved fiend whose evil and degenerate ways brought him to an unspeakable death in the gutters of Baltimore. But none of it is true. That lie has persisted to this day. The legend of Edgar Allan Poe thus became unwittingly entwined with some of the monstrous characters and situations Poe invented in his fictions, and served to make Poe darkly immortal, while the abrasive, dishonest Griswold died alone and in ignominy a few years later. The furnishings in Griswold's final room were spare, and included a large wall portrait of Edgar Allan Poe. One of his few friends described looking through the meager drawers in Griswold's room, and finding several letters of denunciation, against other leading authors of the day, similar to the lies and loathing Griswold had dumped on Poe. Following a sparsely attended funeral, nobody bothered to bury Griswold. His body lay forgotten in a receiving vault for eight years, until in 1865 he was buried in an unmarked grave. His unmarked and unremarkable life was the real depraved monstrosity of which he accused the far more human and brilliant Edgar Allan Poe. It is a scenario reminiscent, by the way, of the 1984 Milos Foreman movie Amadeus, in which a fictional and pedestrian composer Salieri (well-accepted, in his mediocrity, by the establishment of the day) in 1824 bitterly confesses to having killed the immortally brilliant Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1791, and trying to destroy his legacy. The real Antonio Salieri (1750-1825) was a successful opera librettist known across Europe. He was the official composer and conductor of the Habsburg imperial court at Vienna, but his reputation faded to nothing after his death. The fictional movie-Salieri is doomed to live in the same ignominy as the true-life Griswold, while every effort to destroy the other, even in death, have only served to magnify the dead man's immortal legacy. In real life, Salieri was in fact a relentless enemy of Mozart, and was rumored to have poisoned him, and to have conducted a letter-writing smear campaign to destroy Mozart. The background of this rivalry was in part nationalist—the 'ownership' of opera by Italians, like Salieri, and their war against upstarts like the Austrian Mozart. In the case of Griswold, we see only a poisonous little man of no literary talent, assassinating the reputations of his betters. Griswold's only success was his blackening of Poe's reputation. All else was forgettable.

Footnote: Scotland, Burns. Edgar Poe's parents were both actors. His father abandoned the family, and his mother died young of tuberculosis. Edgar was adopted by a Virginia planter and slave owner named John Allan, who gave young Edgar a new middle name. John Allan was by turns kind and cruel. He was an extreme disciplinarian against whom the sensitive and imaginative child would rebel much of his life. The ultra-wealthy John Allan provided next to nothing, and left nothing to Edgar, whom he never formally adopted, though he left an inheritance to another child, born out of wedlock during an extramarital affair. In 1815, when Edgar was six, John Allan moved the family to London, U.K., and then to a town in Scotland named Irvine, on the Firth (Bay) of Clyde in Scotland. That town's most famous literary denizen had been the great Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759-1796). Irvine is about eighty rainy, dismal, writer-inspiring miles west across the mainland from the Scottish capital of Edinburgh on the Firth of Forth, where the famous novelists Robert Louis Stevens (1850-1894; Kidnapped, Treasure Island) and Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930; the Sherlock Holmes canon) were born. The philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) was born in Edinburgh. J. M. Barrie (1860-1937; Peter Pan) was another famous Scottish author, born across the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh, and about 80 miles north, in the witch-haunted town of Kirriemuir, Angus. Edgar Allan Poe was brought back to London in 1816, where the Allans lived until their return to Richmond, Virginia in 1820 when Poe was eleven. There can be no doubt that the foreboding atmosphere of moors and witches influenced Edgar to some extent, since he began writing as a teenager. His first published work was a pseudonymous 1827 anthology of his poetry, Tamerlane and Other Poems, when Poe was only 18. He had just abandoned the Allan household to strike out on his own in Boston, then the literary and publishing capital of the United States. Boston was about to become the capital, starting in the 1830s, of a great New England Renaissance. Edgar Allan Poe, in this manner, became a predecessor of famous authors like Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and many others. This, after two centuries of Calvinist darkness, upon a legacy of witch hangings, forbidden song and art, and a surfeit of gray suits. Out of that gray legacy rose bright new lights like Edgar Allan Poe, whose courage and tenacity was breath-taking when viewed with the hindsight of history. It is only in the last half-century, after all, that U.S. citizens can no longer be imprisoned for owning a copy of James Joyce's Ulysses or D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. It is only some sixty years since the brilliant mathematician and computer pioneer Alan Turing was driven to suicide after being outed as a gay man. Edgar Allan Poe's legacy is popular and lasting, which has always put him in the penumbra of literary frowning and disapproval, while he basks in the eternal sunshine of a compelling, if flawed, mythos. The image of Poe, as master of dark, Gothic, detective, and in general the short story itself, was to hang over the English literary world for generations, influencing the likes of H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, and many more. The French were profoundly impressed with the Poe legacy, which influenced the fictional detective Auguste Dupin, a precursor of Dame Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot. Jules Verne's science fiction mystery stories claim a strong Poe influence. The top Mystery Writers of America award is the Edgar, named after Poe.