Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts on January 19, 1809. His mother, Elizabeth Arnold Poe, had been widowed at eighteen, and two years after his birth she died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-four. Poe's paternal grandfather had been a wealthy man, but his father, David Poe, had left the family to become an actor, and Edgar was left with nothing. When his mother died, John Allan, a Richmond tobacco merchant, at the urging of his wife, Frances Allan, adopted Edgar. She was devoted to Edgar, and in his childhood he enjoyed a security that was never to be his again after he left home. In 1815 John Allan took the family to England in the hope of furthering his business. During the next five years Edgar attended various schools, the most significant of which was the Manor House School at Stoke Newington. The gothic atmosp

here of this school provided him with many details he was later to make use of in his fiction. He wrote about his impressions of the London school in a story called "William Wilson". (Meyers, 1992, p.12).

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