by DoubleChill » Mon Dec 14, 2009 3:49 pm 
Early Life of Edgar Allan Poe
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.
Literary Career and Works of Edgar Allan Poe
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 that 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.
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. John Allan finally disowned Poe. Edgar Allan Poe then decided to go on strike at West Point and refused to attend his classes and so on. He was court-martialed for disobedience in 1931. Edgar Allan Poe then released his third volume of poetry which was titled, simply ‘Poems, Second Edition’.
That same year, Edgar moved back to Baltimore with his aunt. His brother Henry died of tuberculosis in August, 1931. Meanwhile, Poe had begun to try his hand at writing prose. He began to publish his short stories in a Philadelphia publication. He also won a prize for another short story titled ‘The Manuscript found in a Bottle’ from the Saturday Visitor, which was a newspaper in Baltimore.
This got him a job as the assistant editor on the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond. However, he was dismissed within a few weeks for being drunk.
This time when he returned to Baltimore he secretly married his cousin Virginia on the 22nd September, 1835. She was 13 at that time.
On the promise of good behavior, Poe was taken back at his job on the Southern Literary Messenger. He returned to Richmond with Virginia and his aunt. While at that job, he wrote extensively for the magazine. He published poems, book reviews, stories and critiques of other people’s works. The circulation of the magazine increased from 700 to 3500.
On the 16th of May, 1836 he publicly married Virginia Clemm. In 1837, Edgar Allan Poe left the Southern Literary Messenger.
In 1838 Poe published ‘The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym’ and it was widely reviewed. In 1839 he joined the Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine as an assistant editor. There too, he wrote a large number of stories, articles and reviews for the magazine. He also published ‘Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque’ in two volumes which contained a collection of his classic short stories such as ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, ‘The Manuscript found in a Bottle’, ‘Bernice’, and ‘Ligeia’.
In 1840 he left the Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and joined Graham’s Magazine as an assistant editor. There, he published his first detective story titled ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ wherein he created the character of C. Auguste Dupin who solves crimes by the means of a process of deduction. This story was perhaps the first detective story ever told. This character, later, went on to influence Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the creation of his famous detective, Sherlock Holmes.
It was also after publishing this story, that he invited the readers to send in cryptograms to the magazine which he would solve and publish.
In 1842, his wife Virginia broke a blood vessel and started bleeding heavily from the mouth. This was the first sign of consumption and she recovered, but only partly. Under this stress, Poe began to drink heavily.
Poe then left Graham’s Magazine and moved to New York where he joined the Evening Mirror and then moved on to the Broadway Journal. It was there that he got into a public feud with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In 1845, his poem called ‘The Raven’ appeared in the Evening Mirror and caused quite a stir.
The Broadway Journal went bankrupt in 1846 and Poe moved to The Bronx in New York.
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 altering substances which were quite ‘popular’ at that time.
He eventually began to court Sarah Helen Whitman, but their courtship did not develop into anything due to his erratic behavior and the meddling of Sarah’s mother. He then returned to Richmond and began to court a childhood sweetheart called Sarah Elmira Royster.
Death of Edgar Allan Poe
As in life, Poe dealt with demons even in his death. On the 3rd of October, 1849 Poe was discovered on the streets of Baltimore in a very delirious condition. He was taken to the Washington College Hospital, where his condition worsened even more. He was not coherent enough to elaborate on how he came to be found in that particular state. He finally passed away on the 7th of October, 1849.
The Edgar Allan Poe biography is an account of a great man’s life. He was the first to create and popularize the ‘Short Story’ method of writing prose. He was also renowned as a master critic of literature. Poe was also the creator of what is known today as the ‘horror’ genre and the ‘detective story’. The work of Edgar Allan Poe has influenced many renowned authors across the world. Few among them are Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, H.P. Lovecraft, Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, Ray Bradbury, George Bernard Shaw, and Alfred Hitchcock to name a few.
Perhaps, his life can be described better by one of the Edgar Allan Poe Poems, titled ‘A Dream Within A Dream’.
Take this kiss upon the brow
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow --
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand --
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep -- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
By Madhavi Ghare
Published: 4/24/2007
<--G-man
