Edgar Allan Poe Biography

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Edgar Poe was born on the 19th of January, 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts. His father was David Poe Jr. and his mother was Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe. Both of them were actors. Edgar had an elder brother named William Henry Leonard Poe and a younger sister named Rosalie Poe. In 1810, their father abandoned them, and within a year their mother died of consumption. Edgar went to live with John Allan who was a Scottish tobacco merchant living in Richmond, Virginia. His siblings went to other families. The Allan family was quite well to do, and Edgar lived a good life with them. As a mark of respect for his adoptive family, Edgar took the middle name of Allan and came to be known as Edgar Allan Poe.

In 1815, the Allans along with Edgar traveled to England, where Edgar began to attend school. In 1815, he attended Grammar School in Irvine, Scotland, and in a boarding school in Chelsea in 1817. After that, he attended the Reverend John Bransby’s Manor House School at Stoke Newington near London. In 1826, he joined the University of Virginia, but he left within a year. Although the Allans were quite well off, John Allan would not give Edgar much money for his survival in college. To make up for the less money, Edgar began to gamble and lost heavily. His gambling debts created further rifts between him and John Allan.

Poe was poor and needed money. So he joined the United States Army under the assumed name of Edgar A. Perry. He served for two years and attained the rank of Sergeant Major. In 1829, Poe moved to Baltimore, Maryland to live with his widowed aunt Maria Clemm and his cousin Virginia Eliza Clemm. His elder brother Henry was also living with them. The same year, Poe’s foster mother, Francis Allan, passed away. She made a dying request with John Allan to reconcile the differences between him and Poe. So John Allan obtained a commission for Poe to enter the United States Military Academy at West Point. That same year Poe also published another volume of poems titled ‘Al Aaraaf Tamerlane and Minor Poems’.

Poe joined West Point in 1830, but John Allan and he had not reconciled their differences, yet. When John remarried, quarrels broke out between the two of them over the several affairs and children that John had sired both in and out of wedlock.

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