SHORT STORIES: Author’s Biographies
Name: ____________________
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was born in Boston, the son of itinerant actors who died before he was three years old.
he became the ward of a Virginia couple, the Allans, whose name he added to his own. His student days at the
University of Virginia were brought to a quick end by his drinking and gambling, but then, enlisting in the Army, he
served soberly and well from 1827 to 1829. Accepted into West Point in 1830, h quickly ruined his prospects for a
military career by more carousing, and that established a pattern he never again escaped. In 1836 he married his
cousin, Virginia Clemm, then a girl of thirteen, and tried to support her by writing and editing. He was an editor of
the Richmond Southern Literary Messenger, among other publications, and for a time had his own magazine The
Stylus. He won a number of literary prizes early in his writing career, but his earnings remained meager and
alcoholic excess repeatedly cost him his jobs in journalism. After his wife died in 1847, he became engaged to a
wealthy widow; there was hope of relief from his long run of misfortune and poverty. Traveling to meet the widow
in 1849, he met some acquaintances and with them set out to celebrate the change in his luck. After this binge he
was found unconscious in a Baltimore street and died a few days later. His short fiction, with its effects of terror
and its supernatural trappings, made him a household name for American readers, though in fact there are few traces
of American experience in his work. Gothic devices and the mood of German romanticism were his specialty. He
has been called the inventor of the detective story. His critical writings have deeply influenced literary taste and
practice – for example, his insistence on unity of effect in the short story. His poetry has been admired more greatly
and persistently abroad, particularly in France, than at home. He is remembered, as well, for the picturesqueness of
his career, for his striking personal appearance, his fine manners, his debauchery, and his poverty – the stuff of a
romantic legend.
Tobias Wolff
Tobias Wolff (1945- ) was born in Birmingham, Alabama. He received his B.A. from Oxford University and his
M.A. from Stanford. In 1975 he was awarded a prestigious Wallace Stenger Fellowship at Stanford. Since that
time, Wolff has authored the novels The Barracks Thief and Old School, the memoirs This Boy's Life and In
Pharaoh's Army, and the short story collections In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, Back in the World,
and The Night in Question. His most recent collection of short stories, Our Story Begins, won The Story Prize for
2008. Other honors include the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award - both for excellence in the short story the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has also been the editor of Best American
Short Stories, The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, and A Doctor's Visit: The Short Stories of
Anton Chekhov. His work appears regularly in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, and other magazines and
literary journals. Wolff is currently the Ward W. and Pricilla B. Woods Professor of English at Stanford.
James Joyce
James Joyce (1882-1941) was born in Dublin, and though he fled the narrowness of Catholic Ireland for the broader
cultural horizons of Europe, the Dublin of his experience and imagination was the setting for all his major work. In
1904 he went to live permanently on the Continent, supporting himself – badly – by teaching in language schools in
Trieste and Zurich. The fear of censorship, coupled with the timidity of his publisher, delayed until 1914 the
publication of his short stories in Dubliners. Soon after this, however, Joyce came to the attention of the energetic
American poet Ezra Pound, who arranged for the first publication of A Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man
(1916), Joyce’s semiautobiographical novel. Pound’s support continued through the following years while Joyce
was writing what is generally acknowledged as his masterpiece, the novel Ulysses (1922). When parts of it began to
appear in a literary magazine, it touched off a storm of controversy that brought him both notoriety and lasting fame.
On the one hand, this work experimented more boldly with language and devices of narration, including the use of
stream of consciousness, than any work in English which preceded it. On the other, some of the sexual passages
were so candid that censors banned it from the United States until 1933. Joyce continued to explore the resources of
language in his years of fame, these experiments reaching their height in Finnegans Wake (1939).