This tiny brick rowhouse is where a penniless Edgar Allan Poe lived from 1833 to 1835, writing his earliest successful stories. Poe was born in Boston in 1809, orphaned at age two, and raised by a Richmond, Virginia, merchant named John Allan — from whom he took his middle name. After failing at West Point and falling out with Allan, Poe moved to Baltimore in 1831 to live with his aunt, Maria Clemm, and her daughter Virginia, whom Poe would later marry.
He was twenty-two years old, penniless, and largely unpublished. In this small two-and-a-half story brick rowhouse, Poe shared a cramped bedroom with his younger brother Henry, who was dying of tuberculosis. He wrote obsessively — in 1833, he won a fifty-dollar prize from a Baltimore literary magazine for his story MS Found in a Bottle, his first major recognition.
His tales of horror, mystery, and psychological terror that he developed in Baltimore — Berenice, Morella, Lionel the Literatus — established the style that would make him famous. The house is one of the smallest in Baltimore's history of domestic architecture, a reminder that Poe lived in genuine poverty throughout much of his life. The museum inside displays period furnishings and manuscripts.
Poe himself was a complicated, brilliant, self-destructive man — the inventor of the detective story, the father of science fiction, and the master of literary horror, all from this tiny house.