LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Edgar Allan Poe: John Allan
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Several weeks later, Poe returned home to Richmond for what proved to be one of the last times while John Allan was alive. The visit was a friendly one, probably because in March 1830 Poe received his formal acceptance as a cadet. He left Richmond in May and entered West Point in June.
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Poe then signed up for a five-year term in the U.S. Army. In 1827 his Tamerlane and Other Poems was published at his own expense, but the book failed to attract notice. By January 1829, serving under the name of Edgar A. Perry, Poe rose to the rank of sergeant major. He did not want to serve out the full five years... and he arranged to be discharged from the army on the condition that he would seek an appointment at West Point Academy. He thought such a move might please John Allan. That same year Al Araaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems was published in Baltimore, Maryland, and it received a highly favorable notice from the novelist and critic John Neal.
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Poe moved back with the Allans to Richmond, Virginia in 1820. In 1825, John Allan's friend and business benefactor William Galt, said to be the wealthiest man in Richmond, died and left Allan several acres of real estate. The inheritance was estimated at $750,000. By summer 1825, Allan celebrated his expansive wealth by purchasing a two-story brick home named Moldavia.[10] Poe may have become engaged to Sarah Elmira Royster before he registered at the one-year old University of Virginia in February 1826 to study languages.[11] The university, in its infancy, was established on the ideals of its founder, Thomas Jefferson. It had strict rules against gambling, horses, guns, tobacco and alcohol, but these rules were generally ignored. Jefferson had enacted a system of student self-government, allowing students to choose their own studies, make their own arrangements for boarding, and report all wrongdoing to the faculty.
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Edgar’s father, a son of General David Poe, the American revolutionary patriot and friend of Lafayette, had married Mrs. Hopkins, an English actress, and, the match meeting with parental disapproval, had himself taken to the stage as a profession. Notwithstanding Mrs. Poe’s beauty and talent the young couple had a sorry struggle for existence. When Edgar, at the age of two years, was orphaned, the family was in the utmost destitution. Apparently the future poet was to be cast upon the world homeless and friendless. But fate decreed that a few glimmers of sunshine were to illumine his life, for the little fellow was adopted by John Allan, a wealthy merchant of Richmond, Va. A brother and sister, the remaining children, were cared for by others.
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New England has always received a great deal of attention from American writers like Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, John Updike, John Irving and Arthur Miller. Largely on the strength of local writers like Thoreau, Boston, Massachusetts was for some years the center of the U.S. publishing industry, before being overtaken by New York in the middle of the nineteenth century. Boston remains the home of publishers Houghton Mifflin and Pearson Education, among others, as well as (until recently) the literary magazine The Atlantic Monthly.
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David Poe Jr. and Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins, Poe's parents, were touring actors. When Edgar was one year old, David Poe Jr. left the family. At the age of two, Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins died from tuberculosis and Edgar was orphaned. He was taken in by a man named John Allan. Edgar was adopted informally by John Allan. In 1815, the Allans went on a business trip to England for five years.
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