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Poe was born in Boston, the second child of two actors.
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Born Rosalie Mackenzie Poe.
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On 8 December 1811, Elizabeth Poe died of tuberculosis in Richmond, Virginia. News soon arrived that David Poe had also died of the same disease.
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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 was unable to support himself, so he enlisted in the United States Army as a private on May 27, 1827, using the name "Edgar A. Perry". He claimed that he was 22 years old even though he was 18. He first served at Fort Independence in Boston Harbor for five dollars a month. That same year, he released his first book, a 40-page collection of poetry titled Tamerlane and Other 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 first novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, is published.
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Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque is a collection of previously published short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1840.
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Poe publishes the poem , The Raven in the New York Evening Mirror. It is wildly successful, bringing the writer the fame and fortune that have long eluded him. He soon becomes editor and owner of a magazine called the Broadway Journal, a doomed enterprise that is already in debt when Poe takes over.
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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.
