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EDGAR ALLAN POE Edgar Allan Poe, the orphaned son of itinerant actors, led a tumultuous adolescence of drink and gambling, which resulted in the failure of both his university and military careers. Throughout his life he was plagued by poverty, poor health, insecurity, and depression, much by his own doing and a result of his continuing problems with alcohol. He struggled unsuccessfully as a writer until winning a short story contest in 1833. Poe’s subsequent writing ranged from his rigorously metrical poetry to short stories, from journalism and distinguished literary criticism to the pseudo-scientific essays of Eureka. Today he is generally acknowledged as the inventor of both the gothic short story and the detective story. Fittingly, there is still much mystery associated with his death at age forty in 1849, as told by John Esposito in Rosebud 19, which also features a four-page comics biography of Poe written by Carl Posey and illustrated by Roger Langridge. Poe's humorous side is displayed in “Some Words with a Mummy” in Horror Classics.“The Oval Portrait” is adapted in Gothic Classics, and “The Black Cat” in the upcoming Graphic Classics: Special Edition. | ||||||||