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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".
(Shmoop) -
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" David Poe deserts the family, leaving Poe's mother alone with three children. Making matters worse, Elizabeth Poe soon falls ill with tuberculosis".
(Shmoop) -
"A Richmond couple, John and Frances Allan, take in Edgar as a foster child".
(Shmoop) -
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."
(Shmoop) -
Poe enrolls midway through the academic year at the University of Virginia, which had opened less than a year before.
(Shmoop) -
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.
(Shmoop) -
Poe's foster mother, Frances Allan, with whom he was still close, dies in Richmond. Poe—by now a sergeant major in the Army—obtains leave to travel to her funeral.
(shmoop) -
Edgar's older brother Henry dies of either tuberculosis or cholera at the age of 27
(Shmoop) -
Poe—now 27 years old—marries his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm, at a ceremony in Richmond, Virginia.
(Shmoop) -
Poe's first novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, is published.
(Shmoop) -
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 (Shmoop).
