Poe worked in Baltimore, Richmond, Philadelphia and New York, all the major American publishing centers. Poe moved to Baltimore to live with his grandmother, aunt and brother, who now, like Poe, was a poet as well as a drunk, and also dying.Īs Poe sought a career in the 1830s, new forms of printing, production, transportation, finance and education created a boom in mass-print, including books, newspapers and magazines, and Poe became an aspiring writer, poet, editor and critic as American audiences grew along with factories, trains and cities. His fellow cadets gave him money to publish a book of his poetry, which he did and dedicated to them. Realizing that he could not rise in the ranks without wealth, as upper officers all had much and Allan still refused to share his with his wayward adopted son, Poe left.
Poe felt he had to leave the army to become a great writer, but he was accepted to West Point, the first and foremost American military academy, where he got high marks in math and French. Poe published a book of poetry and enlisted in the army, and was almost shipwrecked off Cape Cod in a storm. Poe told his creditors he had crossed the Atlantic to fight for Christian Greek independence from the Islamic Ottoman Empire in the name of Western Civilization to dodge his debts. Poe denounced Allan and set sail with his friend up the East Coast, visiting his brother on their way to Boston. Poe learned that his love had become engaged, but not to him, as her father had intercepted all of his letters and married her off to someone else. Poe racked up drunken gambling debts, and when Poe came home after his first year in college Allan told him he would no longer support the education Poe was wasting. Poe’s older brother Henry visited, who grew up in Boston and worked as a sailor, a drunken sailor as the Irish sea shanty of Poe’s day goes, carousing dangerously about town with stories of the sea.Īt 18, Poe enrolled at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819 and still under construction in 1826, and there was quiet sadness there when Jefferson himself died later that year, freeing seven slaves but selling hundreds more off as part of his estate. Oddly, the Klu Klux Klan would dress up as ghosts to frighten poor black freed slaves, not wealthy white socialites, decades after the American Civil War, which Poe didn’t live to see. Poe began acting out, taking long midnight adventures, wandering with friends, getting into trouble and annoying Allan with pranks, such as dressing up as a ghost to frighten guests at dinner parties. When Poe was 16 John Allan’s uncle died and Poe’s adoptive father became far more wealthy, inheriting three large plantations and many slaves worth many millions today. When Poe was six the Allans took him to live in London for five years, where Poe got fine marks in fancy schools before returning to Richmond, Virginia. Poe grew up in a life of luxury in the antebellum South playing games with enslaved black children on his family’s lands. John Allan, a wealthy tobacco and dry-goods merchant from Scotland, and Frances Allan, who had herself been an orphan, adopted Poe as a wealthy but childless couple, as Poe’s older brother and younger sister went to live with other families. Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849) was born in Boston to a pair of poor actors who were dead before Poe was three.
0 kommentar(er)
