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Edgar Poe is born in Boston to Elizabeth Arnold Poe and David Poe, Jr., both traveling actors. The couple already has one son named Henry.
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Elizabeth Arnold Poe dies of tuberculosis in Richmond, Virginia. Within days, David Poe also dies of tuberculosis. With no parents to take care of them, the three children of the family are split up. Henry goes to live with his paternal grandparents. A Richmond couple, John and Frances Allan, take in Edgar as a foster child. Rosalie is taken in by another Richmond family named Mackenzie. Both Edgar and Rosalie adopt their foster families' names as their middle names.
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The rest of Edgar Allan Poe's family sails to England
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Five years after leaving America for England, the Allans return to Richmond, Virginia.
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A fifteen-year-old Edgar Allan Poe pens his first known poem: "Last night, with many cares & toils oppres'd,/ Weary, I laid me on a couch to rest."
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Poe enrolls midway through the academic year at the University of Virginia, which had opened less than a year before.
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After running up a $2,000 gambling debt while at college, Poe gets into an argument with his foster father when John Allan refuses to give him money to settle the debt. Poe ditches college and the Allans. He moves to Baltimore to join relatives there.
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Poe enlists in the U.S. Army under the name "Edgar A. Perry." Shortly after, his first book—a poetry collection entitled Tamerlane and Other Poems—is published. The author is listed only as "A Bostonian."
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Poe is appointed to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. A few months later he publishes his second book of poetry, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems.
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Edgar's older brother Henry dies of either tuberculosis or cholera at the age of 27.
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Poe—now 27 years old—marries his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm, at a ceremony in Richmond, Virginia.
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Poe's wife Virginia dies of tuberculosis at their home in the Bronx. Poe has been so despondent during the final months of her illness that friends thought he was going insane. The loss of his wife sends Poe into a downward spiral of alcoholism.
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After being found unconscious in a Baltimore gutter, Edgar Allan Poe is taken to the hospital and pronounced dead of causes still unknown. He is buried at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Baltimore.
