-
Edgar Poe was born in 1809 to two impoverished parents.
-
-
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
-
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."
-
Edgar's older brother Henry dies of either tuberculosis or cholera at the age of 27.
-
Poe—now 27 years old—marries his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm, at a ceremony in Richmond, Virginia.
-
Poe's first novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, is published.
-
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.
-
Poe proposes to a poet named Sarah Helen Whitman, who agrees on the condition that he quit drinking. Poe can't live up to the promise, and Whitman calls off the engagement a month later.
-
Poe travels to Richmond and convinces his childhood sweetheart, Elmira Royster Shelton, to become his fiancée. He joins the Sons of Temperance, an organization that forbids drinking (sort of like a nineteenth-century equivalent of Alcoholics Anonymous). The next month, Poe travels to Baltimore.
-
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.
( All facts found on http://www.shmoop.com/poe/trivia.html)
