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Poe is born
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Edgar Allen Poe
The guy who spent his life on the outside is now, a century and a half after his death, considered a member of the inner circle of American literature. It's an ironic twist that Poe himself might have approved. -
Parent's Death
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The Allen Family Sails to England
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Sails back to Richod Virginia
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First Poem
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 Goes to college
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Poe's foster mother, Frances Allan, with whom he was still close, dies in Richmond.
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Edgar's older brother Henry dies at 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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Poe is hired as an editor at Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, a job he holds until June 1840.
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While singing at the piano, Virginia begins to bleed from her mouth, a symptom of untreated tuberculosis. Her illness grows progressively worse.
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The Broadway Journal folds due to serious financial problems.
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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.
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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). T
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Death-Day
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.
