How well do you know Edgar Allan Poe?

Two hundred years after the birth of a writer who blazed a trail for American letters, it's time to challenge your knowledge of the macabre genius


A raven's head. Photograph: Bob Elsdale/ Getty Photograph: Bob Elsdale/Getty

  1. 1. Which crime-writing legend referred to Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue as a "manual of detective theory and practice"?

  2. 2. Poe launched his publishing career in 1827, at the age of 18, but with what?

  3. 3. Poe enlisted in the army in the same year, claiming to be 22 years old, under a false name. What was it?

  4. 4. Published by the Evening Mirror in 1845, 'The Raven' was a sensation, and Poe became a household name overnight. But what is its first line?

  5. 5. Poe's rolling rhythm and spooky scenarios gained him a legion of French fans, including both symbolists and surrealists. One leading poet even claimed that in reading Poe he came across “not just subjects I had dreamed of, but sentences which I had thought out, written by him 20 years before”. Who was it?

  6. 6. “The ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque.” Which of Poe's champions is this, defending him from the slur of exhibiting bad taste?

  7. 7. Poe claimed that the letter "O" was one of the two most effective letters in the English language. What was the other?

  8. 8. He considered the “prose poem”, Eureka, published the year before his death in 1849, to be his masterpiece. Riddled with scientific errors, it nevertheless presents a solution to Olbers' paradox and prefigures one of the most powerful theories of the 20th century. But which one?

  9. 9. Poe is often credited with the invention of detective fiction. What was the name of his fictional sleuth?

  10. 10. Discovered “rather the worse for wear” on the streets of Baltimore on 3 October 1849, he was dead only four days later. The cause of his death has been hotly debated ever since, with suggestions ranging from everything from suicide to syphillis. But which of the following suggestions has NOT been put forward in earnest?

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