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Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston on January 19, 1809. Edgar was the second of three children. An older brother and a younger sister.
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Poe’s sister Rosalie Poe would grow up to teach penmanship at a Richmond girls’ school.
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After his Parents died Poe was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia while Poe's siblings went to live with other families. His fathers name was David Poe Jr. and his mothers name was Eliza Poe. They were both actors
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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 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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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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The number of copies printed by the publisher has been given as 750 or 1,750.
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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.