William henry leonard poe biography and questions
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Edgar Allan Poe’s career as an author, poet, editor and critic contains a number of firsts; as one of the earliest practitioners of the short story, the invention of the detective fiction genre is widely attributed to him, while he also contributed to the newly-emergent science fiction genre. Moreover, he was the first of the well-known American writers to attempt to earn a living solely through his writing, ensuring a life and career which were fraught with financial difficulty and stress. A proponent of the American Romantic Movement, much of his writing involved mystery and the macabre, and he is famed for his work in the Gothic style, a genre which was in high demand by the public and in which his attention to the question of death, decay, reanimation and mourning is considered some of the finest of the genre. While much of his attention to these recurrent themes was at the behest of the reading public to whose literary tastes he, as a professional writer, had to cater, it also stood in opposition to the popular notions of transcendentalism with which he strongly disagreed.
He was born Edgar Poe on January 19th, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts. Both his parents, David Poe, Jr. and Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe, were actors, and he was the second of three children, betw
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Text: Hervey Allen and Thomas Ollive Mabbott, “Chapter 01,” Poe's Brother: The Poems of William Henry Leonard Poe (1926), pp. 19-36
[page 19:]
The Poems of
WILLIAM HENRY LEONARD POE
AN INTRODUCTION
WILLIAM HENRY LEONARD POE, the elder brother by two years of Edgar Allan Poe, was born in Boston in 1807 while his parents, David Poe and Elizabeth Arnold Poe, were filling an engagement at the Federal Street Theatre in that city. The child seems to have first seen the light sometime between January 12, and February 22, 1807, as the unusual interruptions in the appearances of his mother, who was then playing in Shakespearian parts, Ophelia, Cordelia, and Blanche, indicate. The parents of the Poe boys were both poor and seem to have been unable to care for their first child, for on a visit to Baltimore during the theatrical vacation, sometime between May 25, and September 14, 1807, the boy was left with his paternal grandfather, “General” David Poe, who then resided at No. 19 Camden Street, Baltimore.(1) It was thus in the family of his grandparents that he was “ adopted” and brought up.
David and Elizabeth Poe returned to play in Boston where on January 19, 1809, Mrs. Poe gave birth
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