The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe

This collection includes all of Poe’s letters (and all of the letters written to Poe) for which surviving text is known. In a few instances, items are also noted for which no text is known, but the contents have been described. (At the bottom of this list are given some well-known fakes and forgeries.) The Poe Society is very interested in information about any letters that are not on this list or the accompanying checklist, or for which the location of the manuscript is noted as unknown. Photocopies of manuscripts, transcripts and other information may be sent to the Poe Society. The name or anonymity of any private collector will be honored in accordance with his or her wishes.

Currently, the most comprehensive printed collection of letters written by Poe is the 2-volume set of The Collected Letters of Edgar Allan Poe (third edition) originally edited by John Ward Ostrom, and revised, expanded and corrected by Burton R. Pollin and Jeffrey A. Savoye, published by Gordian Press in October 2008. It updates and supplants the previous edition by John W. Ostrom, The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948 (reprinted, with supplemental material by Gordian Press, 1966. The supplement of the 1966 edition included new material as well as combining material published in American Literature, XXIV (November 1952), pp. 358-366 and American Literature, XXIX (March 1957), pp. 79-86. A fourth supplement was printed in American Literature, XLV, no. 4 (January 1974), pp. 513-536. All of this material has been incorporated in the third edition. Letters printed as part of these collections are noted with a code of “OL#n”, where “n” is the letter number. Letters added or appearing with textual corrections in the supplement to the 1966 edition are noted as “OS#n” and in the 1974 supplement as “OS4#n”. Ostrom’s final Revised Check List of letters from and to Poe was published in Studies in the American Renaissance 1981, pp. 169-255. This Check List is referenced as “RCL#n”. Where the text here is printed from the manuscript, and there are notable variances from Ostrom’s text, the item is also noted as “MS”.) A few items included by Ostrom, somewhat erroneously as letters, remain in the checklist but have been moved to more appropriate sections of this web page. It should be noted, of course, that the approximately 420 surviving letters probably represent only a portion of those Poe wrote during his lifetime. In some cases, it is only Poe’s draft of a letter that comes down to us, so that we cannot be certain of the final version. Also, a large number of letters are known only through typescripts, excerpts or copies handwritten by others.

The most complete printed collection of letters written to Poe is James A. Harrison’s The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 17: Letters, New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1902 (also printed as a separate volume, along with Harrison’s biography of Poe). Regrettably, Harrison omitted many items, excerpted text and was not scrupulous in his readings of the manuscripts. As early as 1921, Thomas Ollive Mabbott sought to remedy these problems and began to collect material for a comprehensive edition of Poe’s correspondence, with the texts of all known letters from and to Poe. It was a formidable goal, and over twenty years later, the edition had still not appeared. Even after John Ward Ostrom published the 1948 edition of Poe’s letters noted above, Mabbott planned to include the correspondence as part of his complete edition of Poe’s works. About 1963, Mabbott appears to have shifted his intention, seeking to print only letters to Poe, since these were noted by Ostrom in his check list, but not generally quoted in the text. At some point, Mabbott planned to print only previously unpublished letters to Poe, as short articles in N&Q (Notes & Queries). With Ostrom’s 1966 revised edition of Poe’s letters, Mabbott seems to have abanonded his own plans, or at least to have put them on hold. Eventually, Mabbott’s notes on the letters to Poe were given to Joseph V. Ridgely, who continued the effort until financial problems in the publishing industry put an end to the project in the 1980s. The materials accumulated by Mabbott and Ridgely were subsequently made available to the Poe Society of Baltimore, and substantially constitute the basis for the texts for the letters written to Poe. It is hoped that in making all of these letters available to the scholarly community, we have, at long last, fulfilled Mabbott’s original intentions.

These items are arranged alphabetically by the last name of Poe’s correspondent. Within each name, the items are listed chronologically. A few letters are sent to undetermined addressees. These letters are listed under “Unknown.”