Edgar Allan Poe (September 15, 1871 – November 29, 1961) was Attorney General of the State of Maryland from 1911 to 1915. He was born in Baltimore, the son of former Maryland Attorney General John Prentiss Poe. He was named for his second cousin, twice removed, the celebrated author Edgar Allan Poe, who died in 1849.
Poe attended Princeton University, and played varsity football there. He was the quarterback of the 1889 team, which finished with a perfect 10-0 record. After that season, Poe was named the quarterback of the 1889 College Football All-America Team—the first such team selected. After Princeton beat Harvard, 41-15, a Harvard man reportedly asked a Princeton alumnus whether Poe was related to the great Edgar Allan Poe. According to the story, "the alumnus looked at him in astonishment and replied, 'He is the great Edgar Allan Poe.'"
Poe graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1891 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. He next attended law school at the University of Maryland, where he received a law degree in 1893. After traveling for more than a year in Europe, Poe joined his father and brothers in the family's law firm, John P. Poe & Sons. He was appointed as the Deputy State's Attorney for Baltimore in 1900, a position he held until 1903. He also served as deputy city solicitor and city solicitor for the City of Baltimore before being elected as Attorney General of the State of Maryland, a position he held from 1911 to 1915.
In 1895, Poe married Annie T. McKay, and they had a son, Edgar Allan Poe, Jr. His son, also a Princeton graduate, was severely wounded in World War I while serving as a U.S. Marine Corps second lieutenant in France.
Famous quotes containing the words edgar, allan, poe and/or attorney:
“We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:”
—Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy (1844–1881)
“This wild star—it is now three centuries since, with clasped hands, and with streaming eyes,... I spoke it ... into birth.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“I never can hear a crowd of people singing and gesticulating, all together, at an Italian opera, without fancying myself at Athens, listening to that particular tragedy, by Sophocles, in which he introduces a full chorus of turkeys, who set about bewailing the death of Meleager.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)
“Even an attorney of moderate talent can postpone doomsday year after year, for the system of appeals that pervades American jurisprudence amounts to a legalistic wheel of fortune, a game of chance, somewhat fixed in the favor of the criminal, that the participants play interminably.”
—Truman Capote (1924–1984)