Edgar Allan Poe

His parents were traveling actors and neither one lasted. David Poe Jr. walked out in 1810, and Eliza Poe died of tuberculosis the following year, leaving a two-year-old to the household of John Allan, a Richmond merchant whose trade ran to cloth, wheat, tombstones, tobacco and slaves. The Allans gave the boy their name and never adopted him. They gave him five years of schooling in Britain and then, at the University of Virginia in 1826, not quite enough money, so he gambled for the difference and lost. Allan refused the debts. Poe enlisted in the Army under the name Edgar A. Perry, printed his first book of poems anonymously at 18, and got himself thrown out of West Point by declining to attend formations, classes or church.

He worked the magazines, the Southern Literary Messenger and Burton's and Graham's, as editor, reviewer and hatchet man, and wrote the tales in the gaps. In April 1841 Graham's printed The Murders in the Rue Morgue, which put a brilliant amateur, an admiring companion and a locked room into one story and fixed the terms of detective fiction for everyone after. The Gold-Bug took a 100-dollar newspaper prize in 1843 and outsold everything else he ever published. The Raven ran in the Evening Mirror on January 29, 1845 and made him famous inside a week. He was paid nine dollars for it. He was among the first Americans to try living on writing alone, in a country with no international copyright law and publishers who paid late or not at all.

In September 1835 he took out a license to marry his first cousin Virginia Clemm, who was 13. The ceremony followed on May 16, 1836, in Richmond, with a witness swearing that the bride was 21. Poe was 27. Six years later Virginia broke a blood vessel in her throat while singing at the piano, the first sign of the tuberculosis that had already taken his mother, and she spent five years dying of it in a rented cottage in Fordham. She died on January 30, 1847. Neither the fame of The Raven nor the prize money for The Gold-Bug had bought her a warmer room, and Poe, who drank and could not hold a post for long, outlived her by two years and nine months.

Rufus Griswold, a rival, wrote the obituary that ran on the day of the funeral: Poe is dead, and few will be grieved by it. Then he made himself literary executor and produced a memoir casting Poe as a drunkard and a madman, offering as evidence letters he had forged. It held for decades, because it was the only full life in print and because readers enjoyed it. France rescued him first, through Charles Baudelaire, whose translations became the standard European Poe. Baltimore dug him up in 1875 to set him under a monument and raised the wrong body first, a 19-year-old militiaman. Virginia's bones sat for years in a box under a biographer's bed before joining him in 1885.

Edgar Allan Poe's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Tamerlane and Other Poems book
  Credited only to a Bostonian. Fifty copies, almost no notice 1827
• The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket book
  His only novel, and Jules Verne wrote a sequel to it 1838
• The Murders in the Rue Morgue article
  Graham's Magazine. The first modern detective story 1841
• The Gold-Bug article
  Won 100 dollars from the Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper and reached some 300,000 copies 1843
• The Raven article
  A national sensation, for a fee of nine dollars 1845
• Eureka: A Prose Poem book
  A cosmology he rated above everything else he wrote 1848

• 1811 aged ~2 Orphaned at two and taken into the Allan household in Richmond His father had left the year before. His mother died of pulmonary tuberculosis.
• February 1826 aged 17 Enters the University of Virginia and lasts one year He quarreled with John Allan over tuition and gambling debts.
• February 1831 aged 22 Court-martialed out of West Point The charge was gross neglect of duty and disobedience of orders. He had stopped attending everything.
• May 16, 1836 aged 27 Marries his 13-year-old cousin Virginia Clemm A witness at the Richmond ceremony attested that she was 21.
• April 1841 aged 32 Invents the detective story in The Murders in the Rue Morgue
• January 29, 1845 aged 36 The Raven appears in the Evening Mirror It made him a household name almost overnight and earned him nine dollars.
• January 30, 1847 aged 38 Virginia dies of tuberculosis at the Fordham cottage
• October 3, 1849 aged 40 Found delirious at a Baltimore polling place in clothes that were not his He never became coherent enough to explain it and died four days later.
• October 1, 1875 aged 66 Reinterred beneath a Baltimore monument The gravediggers raised the wrong body first. Walt Whitman came to the November ceremony.

• Walt Whitman 1819–1892
  Poet whose Leaves of Grass celebrated democracy, nature, and the human body in free verse. attended his reinterment
• Nathaniel Hawthorne 1804–1864
  Novelist whose The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables explored Puritan guilt and sin. reviewed
• Washington Irving 1783–1859
  Early American storyteller whose Sketch Book gave the country Rip Van Winkle and Sleepy Hollow. predecessor in American letters
• Stephen King b. 1947
  Prolific novelist whose horror and suspense fiction became a major force in American popular culture. heir in American horror