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Poe's entry from The Twentieth Century Biographical Dictionary of Notable Americans, 1904.

POE, Edgar Allan, author, was born in Boston, Mass., Jan. 19, 1809; son of David and Elizabeth (Arnold) Poe. His grandfather, David Poe, fought in the Revolutionary and 1812 wars, and his father, who had been educated for the law, had become an actor, married an actress, and was playing in Boston, when Edgar Allan, his second son, was born. His parents died when he was but two years old, and John Allan, a wealthy merchant of Richmond, adopted him. He attended school at Stoke Newington, England, and a private school in Richmond, Va., and entered the University of Virginia, Feb. 14, 1826. He remained there but one year, worked in Mr. Allan's counting-room a few months, and in 1827 went to Boston, where, at the age of eighteen, he published his first volume of poems, which he later attempted to destroy. When his money was gone, he enlisted in the army, May 6, 1828, as Edgar A. Perry. He was advanced from private to the rank of sergeant-major in less than nine months, and when Mr. Allan learned where he was he furnished a substitute and had Poe appointed to the U.S. Military academy, July 1, 1830. Poe found the life distasteful to him, and Mr. Allan refusing to allow him to resign, he succeeded in being cashiered in 1831. In 1829 he had published a second edition of his poems under a new title, and in 1831 he published a third volume, dedicated to his fellow students. Mr. Allan's anger at the Military Academy disgrace caused Poe to leave his home and go to Baltimore, where he took up literature as a profession, turning his attention to prose. His first story, published in the Saturday Visitor in 1833, won him the $100 prize offered by that paper. He became editor of the Southern Literary Messenger of Richmond in 1835, and here he began to show the peculiar, mystical side of his writings and his ability and fearlessness as a critic. He became editor of Graham's Magazine in 1836 and in the same year was married to his young cousin, Virginia Clemm. He was made associate editor of the Gentleman's Magazine in 1839, and in 1841, when this was merged into Graham's Magazine, became editor. It was at this time that he published his theories in regard to cryptography, and demonstrated them by solving a hundred miscellaneous specimens that were sent to him, by his contributors. This same year he won a hundred dollar prize with his story "The Gold-Bug." In 1842 he left Graham's Magazine and in 1844 became editorial assistant on the Evening Mirror, then conducted by N. P. Willis, and in its columns in 1845 first published "The Raven." In 1846, after an unsuccessful attempt to conduct the Broadway Journal, he withdrew to Fordham, N.Y., where on Jan. 30, 1847, his wife, died, and he became a complete recluse. Poe's works include: Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827); Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems (1829); Poems (1831); A Manuscript Found in a Bottle (Saturday Visitor, 1833); Berenice (Southern Literary Messenger, 1834); The Fall of the House of Usher (Gentleman's Magazine, 1840); The Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840); The Murders in the Rue Morgue (Gentleman's Magazine, 1841); The Gold-Bug (Dollar Magazine, 1842); The Raven (1845); The Literati of New York (Godey's Lady's Book, 1846); Eureka, a Prose Poem (1847); Ulalume, The Bells and Annabel Lee, written after 1847. Rufus W. Griswold prepared a memoir of Poe which he published in 1880. Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman wrote AEdgar A. Poe and His Critics@ (1859); William Fearing Gill refuted certain statements of Griswold in "The Life of Edgar Allan Poe" (1876), and George E. Woodbury wrote "Edgar Allan Poe," for the "American Men of Letters" (1885). The Baltimore school teachers erected a monument to Poe, 1875, and the actors of the United States placed a memorial in the Metropolitan museum in 1885, Edwin Booth and William Winter officiating. The Poe Memorial association unveiled a bust of Poe by Zolnay at University of Virginia, October, 1899, William Fearing Gill, Hamilton W. Mabie and Robert Burns Wilson assisting, and a cenotaph erected in his memory was unveiled in Baltimore, Md., October, 1899. His name received thirty-eight votes for a place in the Hall of Fame for Great Americans, New York university, October, 1900. He died in Baltimore, Md., Oct. 7, 1849.