nife a hat and a pair of gloves. He also said that he had not received Edgar’s letters and agreed to support him in leaving the Army and enter West Point, but more importantly he promised to forgive Edgar for everything. As Edgar went back to Old Point Comfort he wrote John Allan that except for Fanny’s death he felt “much happier than I have for a long time.” Less Happiness and more Writing Soon after his reconciliation with John Allan, Edgar obtained an appointment to West Point. But Allan soon remarried; Edgar lost all hopes of Allan’s support and he left West Point because the service was an inappropriate career for a young man of little means. Although he romanticized about his forbears and pretended to have set off for Greece and St. Petersburg in some idealized aristocratic pursuit of freedom during his years in the army, it is clear that he faced, from age twenty-two, a life of struggle and poverty. In 1831, Edgar published new collection of poems. He spent most of the next four years in Baltimore living with his aunt, Maria Clemm, and her daughter, Virginia. These were difficult times letters to John Allan indicate Edgar feared imprisonment for debt and mentioned that he was dying for want of help. During this period, Edgar was writing stories and selling them to magazines in Baltimore and Philadelphia. When he became editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond in 1835, Edgar found his dream job: editor, critic and contributor to a series of magazines, each of which flourished under his guidance. Edgar married Virginia in 1836. (He was about twenty-six and she was about thirteen!) With Maria Clemm they formed a household which, in 1837, moved from Richmond to New York where Edgar briefly owned his own magazine. It was in New York that Virginia died of tuberculosis in 1847. The Death of Edgar Allan Poe Following Virginia’s death, Edgar quickly disintegrated, r...
