[4] His father abandoned the family in 1810, and when Eliza died the following year, Poe was taken in by John and Frances Allan of Richmond, Virginia.

In 1827, having enlisted in the United States Army under the assumed name of Edgar A. Perry, he published his first collection, Tamerlane and Other Poems, which was credited only to "a Bostonian".

However, Poe later failed as an officer cadet at West Point, declared his intention to become a writer, primarily of poems, and parted ways with Allan.

Since his death, he and his writings have appeared throughout popular culture in such fields as art, photography, literary allusions, music, motion pictures, and television.

Poe was then taken into the home of John Allan, a successful merchant in Richmond, Virginia, who dealt in a variety of goods, including cloth, wheat, tombstones, tobacco, and slaves.

He was subsequently entered at the Reverend John Bransby's Manor House School in Stoke Newington, then a suburb 4 miles (6 km) north of London.

[20] Poe gave up on the university after a year, but did not feel welcome to return to Richmond, especially when he learned that his sweetheart, Royster, had married another man, Alexander Shelton.

Perhaps softened by his wife's death, Allan agreed to support Poe's desire to receive an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York.

[42] Publishers often refused to pay their writers or paid them much later than they promised,[43] and Poe repeatedly resorted to humiliating pleas for money and other assistance.

[46] The tale brought him to the attention of John P. Kennedy, a Baltimorean of considerable means who helped Poe place some of his other stories and introduced him to Thomas W. White, editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond.

On May 16, 1836, he and Virginia were officially married at a Presbyterian wedding ceremony performed by Amasa Converse at their Richmond boarding house, with a witness falsely attesting Clemm's age as 21.

[57] He hoped to be appointed to the United States Custom House in Philadelphia with help from President Tyler's son Robert,[58] an acquaintance of Poe's friend Frederick Thomas.

[61] One evening in January 1842, Virginia showed the first signs of consumption, or tuberculosis, while singing and playing the piano, which Poe described as the breaking of a blood vessel in her throat.

That home, now known as the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage, was relocated in later years to a park near the southeast corner of the Grand Concourse and Kingsbridge Road.

[69] Biographers and critics often suggest that Poe's frequent theme of the "death of a beautiful woman" stems from the repeated loss of women throughout his life, including his wife.

[77] Speculation has included delirium tremens, heart disease, epilepsy, syphilis, meningeal inflammation,[5] cholera,[78] carbon monoxide poisoning,[79] and rabies.

[80] One theory dating from 1872 suggests that Poe's death resulted from cooping, a form of electoral fraud in which citizens were forced to vote for a particular candidate, sometimes leading to violence and even murder.

[81] Immediately after Poe's death, his literary rival Rufus Wilmot Griswold, wrote a slanted, high-profile obituary under a pseudonym, filled with falsehoods that cast Poe as a lunatic, and which described him as a person who "walked the streets, in madness or melancholy, with lips moving in indistinct curses, or with eyes upturned in passionate prayers, (never for himself, for he felt, or professed to feel, that he was already damned)".

[89] Poe's best-known fiction works have been labeled as Gothic horror,[90] and adhere to that genre's general propensity to appeal to the public's taste for the terrifying or psychologically intimidating.

The physical signs indicating death, the nature of decomposition, the popular concerns of Poe's day about premature burial, the reanimation of the dead, are all at length explored in his more notable works.

[100] Poe was also one of the forerunners of American science fiction, responding in his voluminous writing to such emerging literary trends as the explorations into the possibilities of hot air balloons as featured in such works as, "The Balloon-Hoax".

[101] Much of Poe's work coincided with themes that readers of his day found appealing, though he often professed to abhor the tastes of the majority of the people who read for pleasure in his time.

[112] Poe correctly predicted that Longfellow's reputation and style of poetry would decline, concluding, "We grant him high qualities, but deny him the Future".

[115] Poe's early mystery tales featuring the detective, C. Auguste Dupin, though not numerous, laid the groundwork for similar characters that would eventually become famous throughout the world.

[119] In 2013, The Guardian cited Pym as one of the greatest novels ever written in the English language, and noted its influence on later authors such as Doyle, Henry James, B. Traven, and David Morrell.

[126] Other writers inspired by Poe's poetry and fiction include, but are not limited to, Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, and the beat generation's Allen Ginsberg.

He had placed a notice of his abilities in the Philadelphia paper Alexander's Weekly (Express) Messenger, inviting submissions of ciphers which he proceeded to solve.

His keen analytical abilities, which were so evident in his detective stories, allowed him to see that the general public was largely ignorant of the methods by which a simple substitution cryptogram can be solved, and he used this to his advantage.

[148] Poe's image and namesake has often been used in a number of different capacities including literature, historic places, artistic works, books, film and commemorations.

The winning design by Stefanie Rocknak depicts a life-sized Poe striding against the wind, accompanied by a flying raven; his suitcase lid has fallen open, leaving a "paper trail" of literary works embedded in the sidewalk behind him.