Baltimore
Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, raised in Richmond and died in Baltimore, where he had gone to arrange a lecture and was found delirious in the street. The city adopted him anyway, and his grave and house are local institutions. His sea narrative, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, begins with a stowaway and ends at the South Pole.
The Enoch Pratt Free Library opened in 1886 and was one of the first large free libraries in the United States to be open to all citizens. Its Maryland Department holds local history and the Poe material that the city has collected for more than a century.
A library to check
- Enoch Pratt Free Library — catalogues and digital collections, open to readers online
Books connected to Baltimore
- The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket — Edgar Allan Poe, 1838. Poe's strange, unfinished sea novel: uneven, influential and genuinely unsettling.
- The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume 2 — Edgar Allan Poe, 1840. The core of Poe's fiction in one volume, including the first modern detective story.
A note on accuracy
We describe literary connections and public collections, not street addresses, opening hours or ticket prices. Those change and we cannot verify them for every reader. Follow the institution's own site for current visiting information.