For Edgar Allan Poe, 1834 was an unhappy year. The death of his estranged foster father, John Allan, yielded no bequest for the 25-year-old journalist, poet and teller of tales. As it would throughout the remainder of his shadowed life, poverty bit hard.

“He had only the one shabby black suit that he donned on all occasions.” That frayed, funereal vestment, as Poe himself surely realised, serves as a metaphor for the unhappiness not only of 1834 but of so much of his life.

There is a relentless quality to Peter Ackroyd's book. The unfaltering rhythm of his prose, the repeated phrases and devices, suggest a claustrophobic sense of inevitability. Poe's difficult nature and the economics of the US literary scene in the first half of the 19th century combine in Ackroyd's hands to create a trap from which every escape leads to unhappiness.

Ackroyd delivers his analysis of sources and events with a sort of helpless brutality - “So Poe suffered”; “So he was sometimes a difficult and wilful child”; “So the overindulgence in alcohol could lead him perilously close to madness” - as if even the biographer is powerless against the overwhelming odds stacked against Poe. The result is unsettling but hugely powerful.

Edgar Poe was born in Baltimore in 1809 to the travelling actors David and Eliza Poe. Almost from the outset, little Edgar was an orphan. His father left his mother before his second birthday; shortly afterwards, his mother died of tuberculosis, penurious, abandoned and unhappy. Poverty, unhappiness and an overwhelming sense of friendlessness would follow Edgar through all the days of his life.

He was drawn to fragile women on the brink of death. In most of his significant relationships with women, he relived the spectacle of the beloved female form wasted by TB. A couplet written as a teenager proved unnervingly prophetic: “I could not love except where Death/Was mingling his with Beauty's breath.”

The two-year-old Edgar was adopted by John Allan and his wife Frances; at his christening on January 7, 1812, he received Allan among his names. The Allans showered him with gifts: his childhood was comfortable and loving. At school, Edgar was a promising pupil. The family lived in England, before returning to America.

By Edgar's 15th birthday, however, that note of discord and chafing that would characterise his life ever after was present. He possessed, John Allan wrote, “not a Spark of affection for us, not a particle of gratitude for all my care and kindness towards him”. It was unfortunate that a writer continually driven to rely on the comfort of strangers as well as friends was so singularly in-capable of expressing thanks.

Poe was one of America's first professional writers. Through his journalism, particularly his mordant literary criticism, he became one of the most controversial figures of his day. His poem The Raven caused a sensation and several of the tales on which his posthumous reputation rests, including Ms Found in a Bottle and The Gold Bug, won prizes.

But in 20 years he earned from his books $300 - paltry recompense for an author whose eccentric fictional detective, Auguste Dupin, introduced to an avid public in 1841 in The Murders in the Rue Morgue, launched the detective story as we know it, and whose spoof The Balloon Hoax paved the way for early science-fiction writers such as Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.

To a relation, Poe wrote: “I have perseveringly struggled, against a thousand difficulties, and have succeeded, although not in making money, still in attaining a position in the world of Letters, of which, under the circumstances, I have no reason to be ashamed.” As Ackroyd's appropriately Gothic life makes clear, it was an achievement that offered cold comfort.

Poe: A Life Cut Short, by Peter Ackroyd
Chatto, £15.99

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