Edgar Allan Poe

An American poet and prose writer, born in Boston, Jan. 19, 1809. He was the son of an actor David Poe, and shared as a child the vicissitude of his father's life.  His mother past away when he was still very young, and he was reared by Mrs. John Allan, the wife of a business man in Richmond Virginia. He studied abroad for five years in England and Scotland  before returning back to the United States in 1821. Where he attended the University of Virginia.  Where a series of drunken escapades and unpaid gambling debts forced Poe to leave school and work; that was of  his foster father's counting office. Giving a false name and age he joined the army in 1827, and served as a soldier for two yeas and as a cadet at West Point for seven months.

  In Boston he published his first poetry, Tamerlane.  In 1831 his volume  Poems by Edgar A. Poe, among which were "Lenore" and "Israfel" was published in New York.   In 1836, he married Virginia Clem, The following year the couple moved to the North, where Poe earned a bare living for himself and his young wife by doing hack writing. Pressed by the strain of his wife's illness of tuberculosis, Poe's melancholy and brooding nature led him to heavy drink. His works became more fantastic, and his imagination became more morbidly melancholic. Abnormal unreal characters became a feature of his work.
A haunting magic of words and an exquisite perfection of form characterized his writing of this period, as exemplified in "Ligeia".  It was about this time that Poe published one of the best adventure stories in American Literature, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. During the last decade of his life, he contributed greatly to the development of the detective story. In addition of being a creative artist, Poe was also an acute, if radical, literary critic.  His writings have generally been admired abroad than at home, and he influenced such diverse writers as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Baudelaire.  He died Oct. 7, 1949.