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Edgar Allan Poe's whole fifteen-year career was a constant struggle for survival. He received only ten dollars for The Raven which was first published in 1845, and, within a few months, read, and recited wherever the English language was spoken. Less than a year later his brother poet, N. P. Willis, issued this touching appeal on the behalf of the Edgar. "Here Born in poverty at Boston, January 19 1809, dying painfully in Baltimore, October 7, 1849 is one of the finest scholars, one of the most original men of genius, and one of the most industrious of the literary profession of our country, whose temporary suspension of labor, from bodily illness, drops him immediately to a level with the common objects of public charity. There is no intermediate stopping-place, no respectful shelter, where, with the delicacy due to genius and culture, be might secure aid, till, with returning health, he would resume his labors, and his un-mortified sense of independence. " {An Appreciation} Edgar's father, a son of General David Poe, the American revolutionary patriot and friend of Lafayette, had married Elizabeth Arnold Poe, an English actress and pursued the stage as a profession for himself.
Alcoholism destroyed his acting career and he abandoned his wife and three children of which Edgar was the infant. Edgar's mother fell ill while performing in Richmond Virginia and died on December 8, 1811, at the age of twenty-four. Her three children, who would maintain contact with one another throughout their lives, were sent to live with different foster families. Apparently the future poet was to be cast upon the worlds homeless. Fate decreed that a few glimmers of sunshine were to occur in his life for he was adopted by John Allan, a wealthy merchant of Richmond, VA. Other foster homes cared for his brother and sister.
In his new home Edgar found all the luxury and advantages money could provide. He was spoiled and shown off to visitors and friends of the household. In Mrs. Allan he found all the affection a childless woman could bestow. Mr. Allan took much pride in the little boy.
At the age of five he recited, with fine form, passages of English poetry to visitors of the Allan household. Although never formally adopted by them, Poe regarded the couple, especially Mrs. Allan, as parents, and he took their surname as his own middle name. In 1815, business reasons led Allan to move to England for what would be a five-year stay.
Both in London and then in Richmond after the family's return, Poe was well educated in private academies. In 1825, he became secretly engaged to a girl named Elmira Royster. The engagement, opposed by both families, was broken off. In 1826, Poe entered the University of Virginia, newly founded by former President Thomas Jefferson. He distinguished himself as a student, but he also took to drinking, and he amassed gambling debts of $ 2, 000, a significant amount of money at the time, which John Allan, although he had recently inherited a fortune, refused to honor.
Upon John Allan's death in 1834, Poe received nothing. Poe left Richmond in March 1827 and sailed to Boston, where he enlisted in the United States Army (under the name Edgar A. Perry, and claiming to be four years older than his actual age of eighteen) and published a pamphlet called Tamerlane and Other Poems, whose author was cited on the title page only as "a Bostonian. " This little book did not sell at all, but its few surviving copies are among the most highly prized items in the rare-book market; one accidentally discovered copy, bought for a dollar, was recently auctioned for $ 150, 000. Poe's military career went more successfully. After two years, he had been promoted to a sergeant major. He was honorably discharged in 1829, and decided to seek an appointment to West Point in the hope of becoming a career commissioned officer.
He entered West Point in May of 1830, but after deliberately missing classes and roll calls he was expelled in January 1831. In 1829 he published his second collection of verse, which attracted little more attention than its predecessor. A third volume, funded through contributions from fellow cadets, appeared in 1831. Also in 1831, Poe went to Baltimore, where he moved in with his widowed aunt Maria Clemm, his father's sister, who was to be the most deeply devoted of his several mother-figures, and her eight-year-old daughter Virginia.
It was in this period that he began to achieve recognition as a writer. Through the recommendation of the novelist John Pendleton Kennedy, Poe began in March 1835 to contribute short fiction and book reviews to the Richmond-based Southern Literary Messenger. Poe rose to the position of principal book reviewer and editorial assistant. By the end of the year, Poe, who had moved to Richmond with Virginia and Mrs. Clemm, was named editor in chief. In May of 1836, he secretly married Virginia, his first cousin, who was then not quite fourteen years of age.
Not happy with his salary and with limits on his editorial independence, he resigned from the Southern Literary Messenger in January 1837. Struggling to support Virginia and Mrs. Clemm through freelance writing, he moved his family first to New York and then to Philadelphia as he sought another editorial position. Despite financial difficulties, Poe was able in this period to advance his own writing career, publishing reviews, poems, and especially fiction in various journals and in several volumes. In 1839, he began to write regularly for a magazine, contributing a feature article and a number of book reviews each month. Once again, Poe's editorship brought dramatic advances in both quality and circulation, but he was dismissed from this position in June 1840 after once again quarreling with his publisher.
Failing in attempts to found his own journal, in 1841 Poe became an editor of Graham's Magazine once more the pattern played itself out: the magazine thrived under Poe's direction, he wanted a higher salary and a freer editorial hand, and he left his position -- although this time on relatively good terms with the publisher. Poe's personal fortunes once more suffered reverses as his writing career advanced. In January 1842, Virginia suddenly began to hemorrhage from the mouth, the first indication that she had contracted tuberculosis. She was seriously ill for a time, and would never again be healthy. Poe also had renewed difficulties in his attempts to find steady employment. But in 1843 he published several works, including "The Tell-Tale Heart, " in James Russell Lowell's short-lived journal The Pioneer, and in June of that year his story "The Gold-Bug" won a $ 100 prize in a contest sponsored by the Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper.
Widely reprinted, it made Poe famous with a broad fiction-reading public, but he did not become financially secure. In 1844, Poe moved to New York, where he lectured on American poetry and contributed articles to newspapers and magazines. The year 1845 would bring both triumphs and the beginning of a final downward spiral in Poe's life. His poem "The Raven" appeared in the New York Evening Mirror in January, and was an instant success with both readers and critics. He began writing for the Broadway Journal, became its editor in July, and shortly thereafter fulfilled a longstanding dream by becoming its owner as well. But a series of articles in which he groundlessly accused Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of plagiarism did harm to Poe's reputation, and Virginia's health problems became severe.
Financial difficulties, his worry over Virginia, and his own shaky physical and emotional state caused him to cease publication of the Broadway Journal after less than six months as its proprietor. He moved out of New York City to a cottage in rural Fordham (now a section of the Bronx), where in the midst of poverty, ill health, and Virginia's now grave illness, he still somehow continued to earn a small income writing reviews and articles. On January 30, 1847, Virginia died, plunging Poe into an emotional and physical collapse that lasted for most of the year. In 1848, he was briefly engaged to marry Sarah Helen Whitman, a widowed poet several years his senior, but their relationship was tense and strained, and the engagement was broken off. He went to Richmond in the summer of 1849, hoping to find financial backing for yet another journal, and while there he was reunited with and re-engaged to Elmira Royster, his first love. He sailed from Richmond to Baltimore, where on October 3, 1849, he was found outside a voting booth (it was election day), in a state of confusion and wearing shabby and bad fitting clothing.
He was taken to a nearby hospital dying on October 7 at the age of forty. Neither the circumstances that had led to his condition or the exact cause of his death have ever been satisfactorily determined. Poe's posthumous reputation sustained grievous and long-lasting damage from a libelous biography by Rufus Griswold, whom Poe himself had appointed, and rumors, mostly unfounded, circulate to this day about Poe's mental state and personal habits. Whatever mysteries may still surround his life and character, there is no doubt of his huge importance to literature.
Work cited page 1. Poe, Edgar Allan. World Book Millennium 2000 Vol. 15: 2000. 2. Leer, David Van, editor.
Edgar Allan Poe Selected Tales. Oxford Valley Press, New York, 1998. 3. An Appreciation Underthesun. com web 4. Kenneth Silverman.
Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.
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Research essay sample on Life And Career Of Edgar Allan Poe
