|
|
|
|
Edgar Allen Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809. Around when he was about 2 1/2 his mother died after his father abandoned him. A man named John Allen shortly adopted him, hence his middle name Allen. He stayed with their family, until 1826 when he went to the University of Virginia. He took classes in many languages, but was expelled after refusing to pay a $2000 gambling debt. On May 26, 1827, Poe enlisted in the US Army under the name Edgar A. Perry.. Here his first short book was published.
Soon, Poe's foster mother died. John Allen got him out of the army by providing a substitute. From here on out Poe mostly suffered from depression. He moved in with his aunt in Baltimore and unsuccessfully tried to get a teaching job. He soon moved to Richmond and began working at The Southern Literary Messenger, in which he published short stories, poems, and ascerbic literary reviews.
In May he married Virginia, then 13-years old. After an 1836 printer's strike caused financial woes for the magazine, Poe and White quarreled over both the acidness of his criticism and the irresponsibility of his drinking.
The rest of his life, Poe suffered from severe mental depression and declining physicalhealth (possibly caused by malnutrition and severe drinking binges), but moments ofintense creativity punched through this pain. In 1838, he published his only novel, TheNarrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and one year later he became coeditor ofPhiladelphia's monthly Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, where he printed "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839) and his sonnet, "Silence" (1840). In December, 1839, hisfirst collection of short stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, appeared, but it sold less than 750 copies. Within a few months of this, he lost his job again due to the severity of his criticisms and excessiveness of his drinking so he moved to an editorship with another Philadelphia monthly, Graham's Magazine, which in April 1841 printed "The Murders in the Rue Morgue".
He left one year later to make a meager living off freelance stories, poems, and reviews.On January 29, 1845, the New York Evening Mirror printed The Raven, which created asensation. Poe at last gained fame, but he remained impoverished.That year, he also became editor of a New York Monthly, The Broadway Journal, whichhe eventually bought on credit. In a failed attempt to raise circulation, he wrote a seriesof 5 articles on "plagiarisms" on Longfellow's work, which stirred up great controversy. By late 1846, financial woes and Poe's own continuing decline ended the magazine.
In January 1847, his wife died in their cottage at Fordham. This wracked
a Poe already
assaulted
by his poverty and instability. He continued to write, and engaged in unsuccessful
publishing schemes and romances, until, on October 3, 1849, Joseph W. Walker
found him unconscious in the street. Poe remained hospitalizedoscillating
between a somatic state and violent delirium until his death at 5 am on
the 7th. He has influenced writers ranging from Robert Louis Stevenson
and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to T.S. Eliot and William Faulkner. . Sir Edgar
Allen Poe was truly a great writer.
|
spotlight/poe/poe1.htm for the information I needed to write this biography! |
 |
|