Poe's life and career were always strongly marked by self-division; and in view of his obsessive quest for unity, it is a curious irony of fate that he should have been born in the North and reared in the South. Poe's 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. Poe's mother was a minor actress named Elizabeth Arnold married to a sometime-actor and alcoholic, David Poe. At her death, in Richmond, Virginia, she left her son 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." But the South became Poe's first love 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."
One of the more coherent explanations of Poe's fragmented life is that which casts him as an actor imitating various personalities.
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