Biography of Edgar Allen Poe
Edgar Poe was born on January, 19, 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 older 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 wealthy 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 then 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. He traveled to Boston under the assumed name of Henri Le Rennet and reached there in 1827. There, he published ‘Tamerlane and Other Poems’ under the assumed name.
But 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.
In 1835 Edgar secretly married his cousin; she was 13 at the time. He then publicly married her in 1836 . In 1847, Virginia died from tuberculosis and left Poe a broken man. He became more unstable and started to drink heavily. He began to suffer bouts of depression and madness. Some say, that apart from drinking, he also began indulging in opium and absinthe – two mind...