Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston in 1809, the son of two travelling actors. Before he was three his father had deserted the family and his mother had died, and he was taken in by John Allan, a wealthy merchant of Richmond, Virginia, and educated in England and America. He quarrelled bitterly with his foster father, left the University of Virginia because of gambling debts, entered West Point and got himself expelled on purpose, and thereafter, cut off by Allan, scraped a living writing and editing for magazines, poor all his life. At twenty-seven he married his cousin Virginia, then only thirteen; eleven years later she died of tuberculosis, and in his grief he took to drink. In October 1849 he was found delirious in a Baltimore street and died a few days later, aged forty, of causes still unknown. He is regarded as the father of the detective story and a founder of the modern short story, and he profoundly influenced Baudelaire and the whole of French Symbolism.