Edgar Allan Poe

Born in Boston in 1809 to actors, abandoned by his father at one, orphaned at two when his mother died. The Richmond merchant family who took him in never formally adopted him, and John Allan cut him off after fights over money and gambling debts at the University of Virginia. He enlisted in the Army under a fake name in 1827, published his first poems anonymously as "a Bostonian," washed out of West Point, then turned to prose and criticism, moving between Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York writing for journals. At 27 he married his 13-year-old cousin Virginia Clemm; she died of tuberculosis in 1847. "The Raven" made him famous in 1845, but he died four years later in Baltimore at 40 under circumstances still unknown - disease, alcohol, suicide, no one knows. The first American writer to live by the pen alone, and it kept him poor until the end.