Edgar Allan Pоe National Historic Site

This guide to the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site in Philadelphia centers on the only home of his that still stands, where he wrote The Black Cat in the winter of 1843, a story of a narrator undone by a shriek from behind a bricked-up wall. It follows what was happening upstairs at the same time, when Poe's young wife Virginia began coughing blood at the piano, and the disease he would not name to a friend. Poe published thirty-one stories during these Philadelphia years, more than at any other stretch of his life, in rooms that stood nearly bare by the time the family packed for New York.