Poe's Life in Boston

ROBERT SALMOND
A View of Long and Central Wharves in Boston
1833

The waterfront of Boston, the city of Edgar Allan Poe's birth; the place where his mother and grandmother arrived from England in 1796 and where they had their American theatrical debut; the place where his older brother, Henry, was born in 1807; where his mother and father were featured actors from 1806 to 1809; the place that his mother enjoined him to "ever love"; where, at age 18, he was reborn as a poet when he returned and published his first volume of poetry here in 1827; the place where he enlisted in the army; where his poetic genius received its first real recognition from the critic John Neal in 1829; the place that inspired him to developed his ideas about literature in response to opposing views�he associated with Boston writers and editors; the place with whose critics he waged an hilarious and snarky war of wits after his 1845 Boston Lyceum lecture on the same stage his mother and father had performed on; the place where he attempted suicide in despair over his love for a married Massachusetts woman in 1848; the capital of the state he was determined to move to in the final months of his life in 1849.

Boston Public Library, Print Department