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Author: Poe, Edgar Allan

Biography:

POE, Edgar Allan (1809-49: ANBO)

He was born in Boston, the son of two actors, Elizabeth Arnold and David Poe. But his father abandoned the family and his mother died in Richmond VA when he was three. He was separated from his siblings and taken in by a wealthy, childless Richmond couple, John and Frances Allan. When John Allan's business took the family to London, Edgar went with them and attended boarding schools; after their return to Richmond in 1820, he was sent to private academies. He spent one year at the University of Virginia but built up debts which his guardian refused to pay. In 1827 he left home, published his first book of verse in Boston, and joined the army under an assumed name. In 1829 after Frances Allan died, he was sufficiently reconciled to his guardian to arrange for his discharge and transfer to West Point. Then John Allan remarried, cutting Poe out of his life and leaving all his property to his new family on his death in 1834. Poe was court-martialed out of West Point and turned to writing for a living in New York and Baltimore, where he settled with his aunt and her daughter Virginia. Virginia was thirteen when she and Poe took out a marriage licence and perhaps were privately married, in September 1834, on the strength of the offer of editorial work on a magazine in Richmond. This was the beginning of a productive period in which he made his name as a writer of prose fiction--primarily tales on gothic themes contributed to the various magazines he worked for in New York and Philadelphia--but also developed a drinking problem and quarreled with one employer after another. Virginia died of tuberculosis in 1847. Wanting to remarry, Poe courted three women in different cities at the same time. One engagement was broken off on account of his drinking. On the brink of marriage to another woman, Poe was found drunk and delirious in a Baltimore tavern, and died shortly after in hospital. (ANBO 27 June 2020)   

 

Other Names:

  • Edgar A. Poe
 

Books written (3):

Boston: printed by Calvin F. S. Thomas, 1827
Baltimore: Hatch and Dunning, 1829
2nd edn. New York: Elam Bliss, 1831