Branden MorganHost
He arrived there in 1831 after accomplishing something rather impressive even by Poe's standards.

His relationship with his foster father, John Allen, had deteriorated beyond repair.

His brief military career had ended with his deliberate neglect of duties and dismissal from West Point.

He had no money, no reliable profession, and an ambition to survive by writing at a time when surviving by writing was roughly as sensible a financial plan as surviving by alchemy.


The household also included his grandmother Elizabeth Poe, and for part of the period, his cousin Henry Clem.

It was crowded, poor, and utterly unlike the decaying aristocratic mansions that would later populate Poe's fiction.

And that difference is important, because if you visit the Poe House expecting the House of Usher, Baltimore will disappoint you immediately.

There are no battlements, no ancestral portraits watching from the walls, no subterranean crypt where an inconvenient relative might be temporarily stored.

The house is narrow, modest, and almost aggressively ordinary, the sort of place where poverty announces itself through dimensions rather than decorations.

And inside that cramped domestic world, something extraordinary began to happen.


His story won the prize for fiction, while his poem The Coliseum placed second in poetry.

The recognition helped bring him to the attention of literary figures who could assist his career, and the Baltimore years became an important bridge between the young man who desperately wanted to become a writer and the professional author whose work would eventually travel around the world.

The house also contained the two women who would become the emotional center of his remaining life.

He called her muddy, relied upon her through years of instability and poverty, and later addressed her as a mother in his writing.


Their relationship remains understandably uncomfortable to our modern sensibilities.

Not only was Virginia his cousin, she was also 13 when they got married in 1836. but contemporary accounts describe a household bound together by extraordinary affection and equally extraordinary financial hardship.

He arrived there in 1831 after accomplishing something rather impressive even by Poe's standards.

His relationship with his foster father, John Allen, had deteriorated beyond repair.

His brief military career had ended with his deliberate neglect of duties and dismissal from West Point.

He had no money, no reliable profession, and an ambition to survive by writing at a time when surviving by writing was roughly as sensible a financial plan as surviving by alchemy.


The household also included his grandmother Elizabeth Poe, and for part of the period, his cousin Henry Clem.

It was crowded, poor, and utterly unlike the decaying aristocratic mansions that would later populate Poe's fiction.

And that difference is important, because if you visit the Poe House expecting the House of Usher, Baltimore will disappoint you immediately.

There are no battlements, no ancestral portraits watching from the walls, no subterranean crypt where an inconvenient relative might be temporarily stored.

The house is narrow, modest, and almost aggressively ordinary, the sort of place where poverty announces itself through dimensions rather than decorations.

And inside that cramped domestic world, something extraordinary began to happen.


His story won the prize for fiction, while his poem The Coliseum placed second in poetry.

The recognition helped bring him to the attention of literary figures who could assist his career, and the Baltimore years became an important bridge between the young man who desperately wanted to become a writer and the professional author whose work would eventually travel around the world.

The house also contained the two women who would become the emotional center of his remaining life.

He called her muddy, relied upon her through years of instability and poverty, and later addressed her as a mother in his writing.


Their relationship remains understandably uncomfortable to our modern sensibilities.

Not only was Virginia his cousin, she was also 13 when they got married in 1836. but contemporary accounts describe a household bound together by extraordinary affection and equally extraordinary financial hardship.
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