Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts to David Poe Jr. and Elizabeth Arnold Poe, both whom were touring actors and both whom died before he was age 3. Poe was then taken into the home of John Allan, a wealthy gentleman of Richmond, Virginia who had persuaded his grandfather to let him adopt him. Young Poe, after going to school in both England and Virginia, went to the Jefferson University, at Charlottesville, …showed first 75 words of 657 total…

…showed last 75 words of 657 total…he drank too much, a man who regularly attacked the literary establishment as it existed in America, and, to complete this deliberately biased portrait, a man who sometimes took drugs. If, on the surface, this description sounds ominously like one of our present-day dropouts from society, it also shows how many people in the 1830's and 1840's regarded a man who today is one of the most revered figures in American literature." Robert D. Jacobs.