It’s the birthday of the master of mystery and horror, Edgar Allen Poe, born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1809, and orphaned by the age of three. Poe was raised by wealthy merchant John Allen and his wife Frances in Richmond, Virginia, but did not want to follow Allen into the tobacco business.

Poe attended the University of Virginia in 1826 and excelled at his studies but not at his gambling, and when Allen refused to pay off his debts, Poe had to drop out. He returned to Richmond to find his fiancé, Elmira Royster, engaged to someone else. When things with his guardian tanked further, he went to Boston, published his first and extremely minor collection of poems (Tamerlane, and Other Poems), and joined the army. He achieved the rank of Sergeant Major for Artillery, but after Frances Allen died, Poe got John Allen to buy his early dismissal and get him into West Point, before which he published another extremely minor collection of poems. (Thought: what is West Point like, for a poet? Do you suppose all the stronger, better poets at West Point haze the weaker, lesser ones?) West Point lasted less than a year before Poe purposely got himself thrown out.

In the meantime, Poe had connected with his aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter Virginia Eliza Clemm, of Baltimore, and in 1836-ish he married Virginia, who was only 13 or 14. (So, ick.) Around the same time, he began writing critical reviews, editing literary journals, and publishing some of his most famous stories, such as “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), considered by many to be the first modern detective story. (But T.S. Eliot said that the detective genre was “invented by [Wilkie] Collins and not by Poe,” crediting Collins’ The Moonstone, the first full-length detective novel in English. Discuss.) “The Tell-Tale Heart” came out in 1843, The Raven and Other Poems in 1845, and “The Cask of Amontillado” in 1846, to hit a few highlights. (I love saying “Amontillado.” It’s almost as good as “Umberto Eco.”) Poe became one of the first Americans to figure prominently in world and particularly French literature; in the U.S., he was known (and probably feared) mainly as a literary critic.

In 1847, Virginia died from tuberculosis, and Poe was crushed. He drank more and spiraled down. He rallied enough to become engaged yet again to the now-widowed Elmira Royster (there’s a name that beckons, doesn’t it?), but in 1849, on his way to Philadelphia, he was found ill and disoriented in Baltimore, and died a few days later; newspapers called it “acute congestion of the brain,” an oblique way to suggest something disreputable like alcoholism. His exact cause of death is not known and everything from heart disease to syphilis to rabies has been suggested. He was only 40, yet had become one of the most important influences on literature in the 19th century.

Read “The Raven” in memory of Poe. Have a less than ominous Friday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.