Considered the world’s first detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” would give rise to a literary genre rooted in and characteristic of the modern age.
Growing cities and urban violence. The decade of the 1830s brought the beginning of a surge in the United States population that would continue throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. Fed by high birthrates and especially by a sharp rise in immigration from Europe, America’s growing population not only spurred the nation’s rapid westward expansion, but also created new challenges for the older and increasingly crowded cities of the East. While an estimated 250,000 immigrants had arrived in America between 1800 and 1830, more than 10 times that many—over 2.5 million—came in the next two decades, attracted partly by the labor demands of the emerging industrial revolution. America’s largest city, New York, would see its population increase from about 200,000 in 1830 to nearly 500,000 in 1850, and other major cities such as Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston experienced similar growth.
Excluding Boston, these were the cities in which Edgar Allan Poe lived and wrote, and their urban environments shaped his work profoundly.
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