Edgar Allan Poe born 1809-1849

About:

Edgar Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1809 to two actors, when the boy was less than a year old the father abandoned the family and his mother died a year later. The young Poe was taken into the family of his protector John Allan whose name he adopted in recognition.

Poe led a dissolute and troubled life. In his youth he estranged himself from his foster father by gambling himself into destitution, and managed to get himself a Court Martial from West Point for disobedience. Although he had published papers, reviews and indeed an anonymous novel, it was a literary prize awarded by the Baltimore Saturday Visitor in 1833 that finally gave Poe the chance to earn a living with his writing.

That same year he secretly married his first cousin, Virginia, the secrecy being necessitated by the fact that she was thirteen at the time. But under Virginia’s influence Poe managed to remain fairly steady for the next ten years until 1845 when his poem The Raven appeared in the Evening Mirror and became an instant sensation. He moved to a cottage on the Fordham University Campus, in upstate New York with Virginia and for a couple of years enjoyed a life of writing and of discussion with the university Jesuits. But Virginia had been becoming increasingly prey to tuberculosis and in 1847 she died, sending Poe into a further bout of wild living.

His death is as mysterious as any story he could have written about it. He was found in 1849 in a terminal state on the streets of Baltimore, rambling incoherently and wearing clothes that were not his own. He continued in this state in Washington College Hospital until he died four days later having spent the previous night repeatedly calling out the name of Reynolds, the identity of whom has never been established.