Poet, Author, and Journalist

Career. The son of two impoverished actors and whose father abandoned the family, Edgar Allan Poe was raised as a foster child by the wealthy Allan family in Richmond, Virginia, following his mother's death and his father's disappearance. He briefly attended the University of Virginia and West Point, never graduating from either institution, and served in the army from 1827 to 1829, when he was discharged. He drifted for several years, publishing volumes of poetry: Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829), and Poems (1831). In December 1835 Poe became the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, a position he was asked to leave in 1837 because of excessive drinking and differences with the magazine's publisher. In 1839 he worked in Philadelphia as editor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, leaving in 1840 in order to begin his own periodical, to be called the Penn...