Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.
- Edgar Allan Poe
Milton Merzer the author of Edgar Allan Poe: A Biography, explains that Poe received two awards in his lifetime. One was a $50 prize for "MS. Found in a Bottle" awarded by the Baltimore Saturday Visitor (sic) in October 1833. The other was a $100 prize awarded by the Dollar Newspaper for his story The Gold Bug. Literary awards were not common at that time. His most famous award would be getting inducted to the Hall of Fame in New York, this happened in 1910. Also many of his short stories were published as the prize-winning story for various magazine competitions (earlier magazines focused more on literature than news and politics.) Throughout his life Edgar Allan Poe was always seen as an outcast and somber fellow. His life enveloped in death, guided him to create such miserable and deadly pieces of writing each with its own taste of misery.
“There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.”
― Edgar Allan Poe
Though it seems like Poe’s life was terrible, he did in fact achieve fame. According to the Poe Museum Website,”By 1845 …he was now famous enough to draw large crowds to his lectures…” Many people during Poe’s time believed that he was a pure genius. Other people who were writing during his time were Charles Dickens and Rufus Griswold, Poe’s rival. Poe was known as the father of the detective story meaning that he created detective stories. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was actually influenced by Poe’s stories. Some of the many events that took place during Poe’s life time were Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, Abraham Lincoln was born, Charles Darwin was born, the War of 1812, Charles Dickens born, the burning of Washington D.C., Mary Shelley writes Frankenstein, the Presidency of John Quincy Adams, the Presidency of Andrew Jackson, and the Beginning of the California gold rush.
“I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.”
― Edgar Allan Poe