Excerpt from Tales of Mystery and Imagination Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, on January 19, 1809. Certain peculiarities in his work have been put down to racial tendencies, for his father, though American born, was of Irish descent. But we notice the profession of the parents as a fact more immediate than their racial deriva tion. Both parents were actors, and the stage seems to have been in keeping with certain tendencies in the father. He seems to have been a Bohemian, or rather a vagabond. It is said that he had made an imprudent marriage; it is fairly certain that he deserted his wife before the child Edgar was born. The mother died when Poe was two years old, and Edgar, one of her three children, was adopted by a childless pair, the Allans, wealthy Scotch folk of Richmond in Virginia. Four years later the Allans made a tour through Ireland, Scotland and England. They settled in England for a while, and young Edgar Allan, now six years of age, was given five years' schooling at Stoke Newington. He was eleven when he returned to America with the Allans, and we hear of him afterwards as a youngster at the Richmond school, brilliant indeed, but defiant, irritable and solitary a descendant of a race whose imaginative and easily excitable temperament has at all times rendered them remarkable, as he says, in what seems to be an autobiographical note. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.