From le" to right: an i#ustration of Sherlock Holmes, a photograph of Edgar A#an Poe, and the original cover of The

Purloined Letter, Poes last mystery novel.

The Mystery of
Edgar Allan Poe
Have you ever solved a mystery? Have you ever read a detective story? Edgar Allan Poe was an American author who wrote the rst modern mystery stories and started the popular detective genre.

by Andrew Livingston

The man

A genre is a kind of stor y, like myster y, science ction, horror, or action. Do you have a favorite genre?

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) had a hard life and died young, but he had a big inuence on literature, not only in America but across the Atlantic in England. He and his family were abandoned by his father before he was three years old, and became an orphan soon after when his mother died. He was raised by John and Frances Allan, a wealthy couple in Virginia, but they never actually adopted him. Poe went to school in London, England and enjoyed playing sports and studying languages. He went on to join the military, but later attended the University of Virginia. He and his guardian, John Allan, had disagreements about how Poe was spending his money and his time, but they learned to get along for a while. In 1830, Poe left school and the military and devoted himself to writing. For the rest of his life, he devoted himself to writing poetry and stories, also working as a newspaper and magazine editor.
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His writing never made him rich, but even while he was alive, many people appreciated his work.

The mystery
Sherlock Holmes is probably the best known detective, real or ctional, in the whole world. The stories he appeared in, written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in England, were so popular that when Doyle wrote about his death, people demanded that he bring Holmes back to life to appear in more stories. Though Sherlock Holmes is world-famous, he was not the rst genius detective to solve puzzling mysteries in the detective genre. That honor goes to C. Auguste Dupin, the heroic detective character of Poes mysteries: The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Roget, and The Purloined Letter. Like Edgar Allan Poe himself, C. Auguste Dupin enjoyed cryptography and solving puzzles. Though he was the main character of the brand-new American detective genre, Dupin was French. In the stories, he solved mysteries by looking at details in situations and by imagining what the criminals were thinking when they committed the crime. Readers who followed the story had the chance to try to be like Dupin and solve the mystery for themselves.

Cryptography is a way of putting writing into code and then decoding and reading it. Sometimes it uses different letters, while other kinds switch letters using a secret pattern.

The legacy
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle paid tribute to Edgar Allan Poes stories when he said, Each [story] is a root from which a whole literature has developed.... Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?" Although Poe only wrote three detective stories, he invented a whole new kind of story, one that writers are still imitating today and that readers still love to read. He inuenced and inspired the character Sherlock Holmes, one of the best-known and best-loved characters in English literature, and his inuence lives on.

Livingston 3 Bibliography Cover of The Gift literary annual. 1845. Book cover. Web. 23 Jan. 2013. Edgar Allen Poe. 1848. ARTSTOR. Web. 23 Jan. 2013. Facsimile of manuscript, The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Facsimile. 1895. Web. 23 Jan. 2013. Fisher, Benjamin F. Foreword. The Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Benjamin F. Fisher, ed. New York: Barnes and Noble, 2004. xv-xlii. Print. Lix, Frdric. Illustration to "The Purloined Letter" by E. A. Poe. Drawing. 1864. . Web. 23 Jan. 2013. Paget, Sidney. Sherlock Holmes in "The Man with the Twisted Lip". 1891. Drawing. Strand Magazine. Web. 23 Jan. 2013.