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Edgar Allan Poe is born
Edgar Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809. That makes him Capricorn, on the cusp of Aquarius. His parents were David and Elizabeth Poe. David was born in Baltimore on July 18, 1784. -
Poe's sister is born
There is a tradition that Edgar Allan Poe's sister Rosalie was born on December 20, 1810, but there is no solid documentary evidence for this claim. All we know is that she was born long enough after the mysterious disappearance of her mother Eliza's husband, David Poe, for questions to arise about the child's paternity. -
Poe's Parents Die
The family was dirt poor. By 1811, his father had abandoned the family, leaving Elizabeth Poe alone with two-year-old Edgar, his elder brother Henry, and his infant sister Rosalie. And things soon got worse. On 8 December 1811, Elizabeth Poe died of tuberculosis in Richmond, Virginia. News soon arrived that David Poe had also died of the same disease, within days of his estranged wife. -
Edgar writes his 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 inlists in the army and shortly after his first book is published
Poe quarreled with Allan over the funds for his education and enlisted in the Army in 1827 under an assumed name. It was at this time his publishing career began, albeit humbly, with an anonymous collection of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), credited only to "a Bostonian" -
Edgar Allan Poe's older brother dies
Before the age of 20, Henry traveled around the globe by sea before returning to Baltimore and becoming a published poet and author. One of his works, "The Pirate", was a fictionalized account of his brother's first relationship with Sarah Elmira Royster in Richmond. Henry died of tuberculosis in 1831 at the age of twenty-four. -
Poe marries his 13 year old cousin, Virginia Clemm
Virginia Clemm was the wife of American writer Edgar Allan Poe. The couple were first cousins and married when Virginia Clemm was 13 and Poe was 27. Some biographers have suggested that the couple's relationship was more like that between brother and sister than like husband and wife in that they may have never consummated their marriage. -
Poe writes his first novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) is the only complete novel written by American writer Edgar Allan Poe. The work relates the tale of the young Arthur Gordon Pym, who stows away aboard a whaling ship called the Grampus. Various adventures and misadventures befall Pym, including shipwreck, mutiny, and cannibalism, before he is saved by the crew of the Jane Guy. Aboard this vessel, Pym and a sailor named Dirk Peters continue their adventures further south. Docking on land, the -
Poe's story collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque is published in two volumes.
It was published by the Philadelphia firm Lea & Blanchard and released in two volumes. -
Poe publishes the poem The Raven
Edgar Allan Poe's famous poem "The Raven," beginning "Once upon a midnight dreary," is published on this day in the New York Evening Mirror. Poe's dark and macabre work reflected his own tumultuous and difficult life. -
Poe's wife Virginia dies of tuberculosis at their home in the Bronx.
In January 1842 she contracted tuberculosis, growing worse for five years until she died of the disease at the age of 24 in the family's cottage outside New York City. -
Edgar Allan Poe Dies
In the early morning hours of October 7, Poe calmly breathed a simple prayer, "Lord, help my poor soul," and died. His cause of death was ascribed to "congestion of the brain." No autopsy was performed, and the author was buried two days later. In dying under such mysterious circumstances, the father of the detective story has left us with a real-life mystery which Poe scholars, medical professionals, and others have been trying to solve for over 150 years.
