Poe, Edgar Allan
Poe, Edgar Allan ( 1809 – 49 ),born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of itinerant actors. He became an orphan in early childhood, and was taken into the household of John Allan , a tobacco exporter of Richmond; he took his foster-father's name as his middle name from 1824 onwards. He came to England with the Allans ( 1815 – 20 ) and attended Manor House school at Stoke Newington (which he describes, in an imaginative manner but with some accurate detail, in his Doppelgänger story ‘William Wilson’, 1839 ); he spent a year at the University of Virginia, which he left after incurring debts and gambling to relieve them. He published his first volume of verse, Tamerlane and Other Poems ( 1827 ), anonymously and at his own expense; then enlisted in the US army under the name of Edgar A. Perry . He was sent to Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, which provided settings for ‘The Gold Bug’ ( 1843 ) and...
[The entire page is 612 words long]
Join eNotes
Over 3,500 study guides, question and answer forums, literature criticism, reference content, and much more!
Oxford University Press Titles
