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1845 Poe publishes the poem, The Raven.
Poe’s dark and macabre work reflected his own tumultuous and difficult life. Born in Boston in 1809, Poe was orphaned at age three and went to live with the family of a Richmond, Virginia, businessman. Poe enrolled in a military academy but was expelled for gambling. He later studied briefly at the University of Virginia. -
Jan 19, 1809 Edgar Allan Poe is Born
Born January 19, 1809, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. American short-story writer, poet, critic, and editor Edgar Allan Poe's tales of mystery and horror initiated the modern detective story, and the atmosphere in his tales of horror is unrivaled in American fiction. -
Dec 10, 1810 Poe’s Sister is born.
Rosalie Mackenzie Poe, née Rosalie Poe, was the estranged sister of Edgar Allan Poe. Rosalie, born approximately December 1810 in Norfolk, Virginia, was the last of Elizabeth Arnold Poe’s children -
Dec 8, 1811 Poe’s Parents Die.
His parents were David and Elizabeth Poe. David was born in Baltimore on July 18, 1784. Elizabeth Arnold came to the U.S. from England in 1796 and married David Poe after her first husband died in 1805. They had three children, Henry, Edgar, and Rosalie. -
1824 Poe writes his first poem.
The Raven, Dark. -
May 26, 1827 Poe enlists in the U.S. Army and shortly after his first book is published.
On January 28, 1831, a court-martial tried a young cadet at the U.S. Military Academy on charges of gross neglect of duty and disobedience of orders. Sergeant Major Edgar Allan Poe was found guilty of both charges and discharged from the service of the United States only six months after he had arrived at the academy. This is the story of how the author’s military career went so wrong, so fast. -
Aug 1, 1831 Poe’s older brother dies.
William Henry Leonard Poe, Edgar’s older brother, dies in Baltimore, probably of tuberculosis or cholera. (Discounting the possiblity of cholera, it has been noted that the disease did not arrive in the United States until 1832.) -
May 16, 1836 Poe marries his thirteen year old cousin, Virginia Clemm.
Poe met his bride-to-be, Virginia Clemm, when she was 7 years old, and he was 20, shortly after his mother’s death in 1829. Their parents, his natural father (David Poe) and her mother (Maria Clemm), were siblings, and Poe had moved into the Clemm home briefly before his time at West Point was to begin. -
1838 Poe writes his first novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket 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 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, they encounter ho -
1840 Poe's story collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque is published in two volumes.
Sometime after 1835, having failed to find a publisher, Poe abandoned his proposed Tales of the Folio Club, but not the idea of a collected edition of his prose fiction. Dropping the apparatus of a literary club, and the “burlesques upon criticism,” he combined the original tales with additional items which had appeared in the pages of the Southern Literary Messenger. This new collection of 25 stories became Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. By September of 1839 -
Jan 30, 1847 Poe's wife Virginia dies of tuberculosis at their home in the Bronx.
On January 20, 1842, Virginia was playing the piano and singing when she began to cough and blood poured from her mouth. This pulmonary hemorrhaging was a symtom of tuberculosis (then called consumption), a disease which had already killed so many of Edgar's loved ones. -
Oct 7, 1849 Edgar Allen Poe Dies
One of Poe’s professional and personal rivals Rufus Wilmot Griswold wrote a lengthy obituary for his enemy that was so libelous Griswold signed it with a pseudonym. The article portrayed Poe as a mad, drunken, womanizing opium addict who based his darkest tales on personal experience. Griswold expanded this account into a brief memoir of the author, and Griswold’s distorted picture of Poe influenced popular opinion of the author for over a century.
