His adult life alternated between Boston and Richmond, in ever-decreasing pendulum swings from the coastal cities of New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, to rest motionless in the streets of Baltimore. He was born on 19 January 1809. His mother was a minor actress named Elizabeth Arnold married to a sometime actor and reputed alcoholic, David Poe. By the time Edgar was three years of age, his father had mysteriously disappeared from the scene, and Elizabeth Poe was on her deathbed in Richmond, Virginia. Poe and his older brother, William Henry, and younger sister, Rosalie, were suddenly orphans. At her death Poe's mother left him an inscription on a sketch she had made of Boston Harbor: "For my little son Edgar, who should ever love Boston, the place of his birth, and where his mother found her best, and most sympathetic friends." The South became Poe's first love, however, and Richmond the city he called home. Yet, in early youth, alienated from his foster father, John Allan, a Richmond merchant, and from Southern society, Poe fled north to Boston, where his first book,
Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), appeared anonymously as "By a Bostonian."
Biographers have always found this beginning powerfully suggestive of the major tensions and divisions in Poe's life and literary career.
