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 allan, poe and/or attorney:
“Barnaby, the idiot, is the murderer’s own son.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“There is not a more disgusting spectacle under the sun than our subserviency to British criticism. It is disgusting, first, because it is truckling, servile, pusillanimous—secondly, because of its gross irrationality. We know the British to bear us little but ill will—we know that, in no case do they utter unbiased opinions of American books ... we know all this, and yet, day after day, submit our necks to the degrading yoke of the crudest opinion that emanates from the fatherland.”
—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)