Edgar Allan Poe belonged to the first, struggling generation of professional writers in America. Ralph Waldo Emerson had his private wealth, Nathaniel Hawthorne had his job at the Customs House, and Louisa May Alcott had her best seller, but these were rare comforts. In the first half of the eighteenth century, to live upon what you earned as a writer, as Melville and Whitman and Poe tried to do, was to invite poverty and constraint. ... FULL STORY »
