How Much Money Did Edgar Allan Poe Actually Make From 'The Raven'?

On January 29, 1845, a poem was printed in the New York Evening Mirror that would quickly become a sensation. 

The 108-line work—18 stanzas of six lines each—told the melancholic story of an unnamed student, haunted by thoughts of his lost love Lenore, whose situation is only worsened by the arrival of a raven that repeatedly squawks just one word: “Nevermore.” The poem was Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, today one of the most famous poems in American literature, and by far the best known and most popular of all those written by Poe. 

The poem proved immediately popular. Within a matter of weeks, it had been reprinted more than 10 times in other newspapers across the country, spawned countless parodies and imitations, become a popular society party-piece memorized and recited at literary gatherings, and transformed its author from a penniless struggler with barely $4 to his name to perhaps the most-talked-about writer in America. Despite its enormous success, however, in reality The Raven did little to improve its author’s financial situation. 

Here's how much money Edgar Allan Poe actually made from The Raven.

THE PRINTING PROCESS

Although some accounts suggest that Poe may have been working on the poem for as many as ten years before its eventual publication (with one story even claiming the poem originally featured an owl), the earliest reliable record we have of The Raven dates from 1843, when Poe is said to have discussed the poem and recited several verses while staying at a tavern in the literary neighborhood of Saratoga, New York.

Poe seems unlikely to have had a final draft at this time; when he first tried to have the poem published in a periodical in Philadelphia the following year, The Raven was not only turned down by the editor but “condemned,” suggesting it was an early, unpolished version that Poe initially tried to print. The editor who turned it down, George Rex Graham, was a good friend and former employer of Poe’s, who is said to have nonetheless given Poe $15 “as charity” despite not printing it; ironically, this would be more than Poe would go on to make when the poem finally did make it to print. 

HOW MUCH HE ACTUALLY MADE

Quite how much Poe went on to sell The Raven for when it was published the following January is unclear. He initially sold it to the monthly periodical The American Review, but the New York Evening Mirror received advance sheets of the magazine and appears to have printed the poem ahead of the Review’s February edition. (The Mirror also credited Poe himself, while the Review went on to print it under his pseudonym, “Quarles.”) Although some sources suggest the Review paid as much as $30 for the work, in truth Poe was likely only paid around $9 for the poem, equivalent to around $400 today. 

Poe received no further royalties from magazine sales or newspaper sales, nor from the vast number of reprints that followed, and nor were there any copyright laws or other legal means for him to do so. He did at least receive some royalties from a short anthology of his work, The Raven and Other Poems, that was published in New York the following November, but its sales were reportedly only modest. 

As a result, despite the poem’s immediate success—and Poe’s immediate fame besides—the $9 he sold The Raven to The American Review for in 1845 was all but his entire earnings.

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