EDGAR ALLAN POE, 1809-1849
[Illustration: EDGAR ALLAN POE]
EARLY LIFE.--The most famous of all southern writers and one of the world's
greatest literary artists happened to be born in Boston because his
parents, who were strolling actors, had come there to fill an engagement.
His grandfather, Daniel Poe, a citizen of Baltimore, was a general in the
Revolution. His service to his country was sufficiently noteworthy to cause
Lafayette to kneel at the old general's grave and say, "Here reposes a
noble heart."
An orphan before he was three years old, Poe was reared by Mr. and Mrs.
John Allan of Richmond, Virginia. In 1815, at the close of the War of 1812,
his foster parents went to England and took him with them. He was given a
school reader and two spelling books with which to amuse himself during the
long sailing voyage across the ocean. He was placed for five years in the
Manor School House, a boarding school, at Stoke Newington, a suburb of
London. Here, he could walk by the very house in which Defoe wrote
_Robinson Crusoe_. But nothing could make up to Poe the loss of a mother
and home training during those five critical years. The head master said
that Poe was clever, but spoiled by "an extravagant amount of pocket
money.
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