Edgar biography

That this gloomy type created the Detective genre, composed a verse about the Vorona, who knew how to dorm “Nevermore”, and also wrote a lot of crypt stories about the death of different ladies with strange names. They also love to call him the "father of Gothic." And when you look at his only portrait where a person with a convex forehead and a heavy look is depicted, it is very easy to believe in this title.

Life is a gloomy manual on how to become incredibly known and, moreover, live without a penny, combine genius and enormous conceit with drunkenness, chronic bad luck and heavy bouts of depression, make a name for toxic critical articles, and much later to truly become famous thanks to death texts. Biographers do not undertake to say what exactly was ill for the software, but are inclined to bipolar or schizoid disorder.

So, all forty years of life, the writer through short periods of enlightenment passed from one depressed episode to another. No wonder his personality is shrouded in a mourning flalor of Gothic and hopelessness. The gloomy beginning of Edgar was born in January in Boston, in a family of actors. He was a second child out of three, had an older brother and younger sister. Moreover, Edgar's life began with the mysterious disappearance of his father.

Some sources call David on a mediocre drunkard, others - a talented actor. In the year, he married the Englishwoman Elizabeth Arnold, the widowed actress. Three years later, Edgar was born, and after that David threw his wife or died. In any case, after December, Edgar was a little less than a year about David there were no written evidence or references.

According to one version, he died in Norfolka in the year. In December, Elizabeth Po, from consumption, also died. The theater in which she worked burned. So three children were left not only without parents, but also without a roof over their heads. The eldest, William Henry Leonard, went to Baltimore to his father’s parents, and Edgar and Rosali sent rich merchants - Allanov and their neighbors Mackenzie to families.

Henry became a sailor and traveled a lot, wrote melancholy poems and prose in a similar manner, some of his works were published in literary magazines. He died at 24 from tuberculosis. Edgar loved his brother very much, was inspired by his travel stories and at the beginning of his career was even signed by the pseudonym Henri Lee Renna, who plays his name in the French manner. Rosalie grew up in the Mackenzie family and spent all her childhood next to Edgar.

At twelve years, she was ill with meningitis, which affected her mental and physical development, and therefore was under the care of the foster family up to the civil war. After the war, Mackenzie went bankrupt, and Rosali went to Baltimore, and later - to Richmond, where she interrupted that she sold copies of Edgar's photographs, until she was placed in a shelter for the poor in Washington.

Rosalie died there at 64. As for Edgar himself, he grew up in Richmond, in the Allans family. Although he received their surname, Edgar was not officially adopted, which did not give him rest all his life.

Even in the will, the adopted father did not mention him. John Allan earned a fortune on the trade in fabrics, tobacco, wheat, grave slabs and slaves. He brought up Edgar in a strange manner, then the pranks, then demanding strict discipline. In the year, Allans moved to Britain, where John was going to continue the trade business. Edgara was given to school first in Scotland, then in London and Stock-Neington.

You can say he received a classic English education. Cold rooms, bodily punishments and unfriendly senior comrades, obsessed with the social hierarchy, are attached. At school, he first fell in love - and and the mother of a classmate, to whom he often went to visit. It was a platonic love - the young in terms of simple human attention was not enough, and he accepted his manifestation too close to his heart, as often happens in adolescence.

Alas, a thirty -year -old woman, having gone crazy, died a year later. Doesn't it remind you? This image was so captured in Edgar's memory that many heroines of his future stories received similar features. John's trade business in Britain burned out, and the family was on the verge of bankruptcy. Suddenly, an almost fabulous salvation in the person of a distant relative arrived, who bequeathed his whole fortune to the head of the Allans family.

The family returned to Richmond, where she bought a large house, and since then, the Allanov’s affairs have gone well. Unlike Edgar's affairs. The chronic loser of the grown Edgar was sent to the University of Virginia in Charlottsville - just an open institution working on the new -fashioned system of its founder, third US president Thomas Jefferson. Edgar studied classical philology and modern languages.

Father also insisted on mathematics, but studying was worth the money, and there was not enough for another course. John believed that he had allocated a stepson sufficient amount, but apparently did not understand how much he had to pay Edgar at the university: a room, food, classes, cleaning services and laundry rooms - and it was also necessary to buy clothes, textbooks, furniture, firewood for a fireplace.Mathematics did not fit into his budget.

This was the first reason for the constant quarrels of Edgar and his father, and they quarreled almost continuously until the end of John's life. The character of the merchant of grave slabs and slaves was not sugar - he considered Edgar to be mediocre and told all his friends about this in letters. The constant lack of money was nervous in, but the new -fashioned training system, which included student self -government, self -education and self -development, that is, chaos, left him a sea of ​​free time to try to extract this money.

Edgar began to play cards with students who did not value self -education either, but cards, tobacco and alcohol are very. By the way, a popular cocktail of that time was a “peach and honey” - a mixture of fruit with honey, brandy or whiskey. Considering that Edgar did not tolerate alcohol poorly-he was instantly drunk from a small stack-for sure precisely because of Persian and Honey, he “accumulated” a huge card debt by the end of the school year.

It was five times higher than the cost of his training at the university. Letters from Edgar creditors quickly reached the foster father. He arrived at the university very angry and flatly refused to recognize the card debts of the stepson, paying only the debt for training. And upon returning to Richmond, Edgar discovered that his lover and almost bride Sarah Elmir Roister married another.

Not wanting to listen to John Allan’s notations about his mediocrity and uselessness, he left for Boston, as soon as he knocked a month worked as a clerk and author of newspaper reports, but this did not bring money, and therefore he soon enrolled in the army under the name of Edgar A. Perry, the council that he in the same year during the service in Fort Independence printed his first collection of poems Tamerlan - a thin book, poorly printed on cheap paper with a circulation in copies.

It included a heroic poem and five poems written in the university - in them Edgar imitates the style of Byron and Kitsa. To earn money in America of those years, it was necessary to be a very famous writer and not an American. The authors of the United States then considered the publishers fellowless and almost did not print. In addition, they had to pay. But the international law on copyright did not yet exist, because the texts of English and French literature were simply stolen and reinvented with joy.

For the printing of his collection, the software had to pay from my own pocket. John Allan did not approve the poetic career - they also quarreled on this occasion. After Independence, the Edgar regiment was sent to the island of Sullivan. I studied it along and across, later describing the Golden Beetle in the story. Thanks to his literacy, which was rare among the soldiers, they were credited to the regiment headquarters.

There he carefully led the office, won the location of the officers and quickly received the title of the main regimental sergeant - a career ceiling for a person without military education. At first, the service fascinated the software, but the little island quickly bored him. Because of this or for another obscure reason, he often made decisions, following some vague impulses Edgar decided to leave the army.

It turned out to be not so simple. At first, Edgar wrote to John Allan, admitting that he lied about his age, and asked him as a guardian to confirm that the contract for the service was invalid. John ignored the letter, as Pasynka later did with many other letters, ”Francis Allan did not even inform him of the disease, who, unlike her husband, loved Edgar very much.

Edgar did not have time for the funeral of the adoptive mother - he arrived a day later. Another reason was added to the piggy bank of future quarrels with John. From the artillery regiment, he left only in the year, agreeing to the father’s proposal to go to study at the West Point Military Academy. On the way to the writer's career, Edgar did not immediately enter the academy - the documents were considered for several months.

He spent this time in Baltimore, his aunt Maria Klem and her daughter Virginia, who later married. It is not clear why, in his devotion, he wrote to literature from the university - he decided to build a military career a lot and constantly. Perhaps I wanted to finally gain the approval and respect of the stepfather? But he did not receive any of this - Vedovov, John quickly married again, and his new wife categorically did not like it.

In addition, John had many illegitimate children, whom he, as it should be for a devout person, recognized and accepted into his family. In general, for Edgar there was no more space there. He raised the money for him with his comrades, whom he entertained funny sarcastically and overnight sketches. Now they would be called memes. The classmates of 75 cents dropped at 75 cents-they raised the whole dollars, but certainly did not expect that something so serious would come out.

Disappointed in the reception of his father and a military career, sabotage his studies, fell under the tribunal and flew out of the academy. He left for New York, where in the same year he released the third collection-“Poems. Second edition ”, which included earlier poems“ Tamerlan ”,“ Al-Araf ”and six new poems.On this joyful note, the writer returned to Baltimore, where he found the death of Henry's older brother.

After that, he took up the writer's career seriously. The time was favored by this - in America the boom of literary magazines began. Of course, many of them quickly burned out, because they could not collect enough subscribers.