Edgar Allan Poe

Born in 1809 in Boston to itinerant actors, Edgar Poe was orphaned before his third birthday when his mother died of tuberculosis in a Richmond boarding house, a curtain pinned across the room to separate the dying woman from her children. He was taken in, though never formally adopted, by John Allan, a prosperous Virginia tobacco merchant whose surname he added to his own. Allan paid for his education in England and at the University of Virginia, where Poe excelled at languages but accumulated gambling debts that led to a bitter rupture with his foster father. He enlisted in the Army, attended West Point briefly, and was dismissed for deliberate neglect of duties, freeing himself to write. He married his thirteen-year-old cousin Virginia Clemm in 1835 and spent the next decade in editorial offices in Richmond, Philadelphia, and New York, producing the tales and poems that invented the detective story, refined the modern horror tale, and established the short story as a serious literary form. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), "The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843), "The Raven" (1845), and "The Cask of Amontillado" (1846) entered the permanent fabric of American literature. Virginia's death from tuberculosis in 1847 shattered him. Two years later, on October 7, 1849, Poe was found delirious on a Baltimore street in clothes that were not his own. He died four days later at Washington College Hospital, at forty, the cause still debated and never resolved.

In the summer of 1849, back in Richmond, Poe rekindled his first romance with Sarah Elmira Royster, now a widow, and the two became engaged. To reassure her he swore off drink and joined the Sons of Temperance. Weeks later, travelling north, he vanished, and turned up delirious in Baltimore.