The Oxford Companion to English Literature | 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...
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