Edgar was an orphan at a young age. He was soon adopted by the Allen family . He got along with his adoptive mother but not so much the father. Allan was a tobacco merchant and he wanted Edgar to follow in his footsteps. Edgar refused to do it though. As Poe grew older, as seen in letters preserved by the National Park Service, when Allan repeatedly refused to lend Poe necessary financial assistance — despite frequent, desperate pleading from Poe — leading to the academically successful boy being unable to afford his classes, falling deep into debt, and becoming increasingly destitute. Due to the fact that Poe was so horribly young when his mother perished, he spent much of his early years trying to connect with substitute mother figures, the most notable being his foster mother Frances Allen. Another of these was Jane Stith Stanard, the mother of his friend Robert, though it has been speculated — with notable evidence — that Poe when he was going through puberty, may have developed deeper feelings for her. When situations turned stressful at the Allan household, as they often did, it was Stanard whom Poe would go to for support, and while obviously, no true romantic relationship could ever form — this was, at its core, a teenage crush — Poe did have enormous love and respect for her: in addition to writing a poem that subtly compared her to Helen of Troy, Poe would, years later, describe her as "the first, purely ideal love of my soul."When Edgar Allan Poe was drowning in debt, starving, and receiving no aid from John Allan, he turned to a last-ditch solution: according to Mental Floss, he took the false identity of Edgar A. Perry, claimed to be a 22-year-old Boston clerk, and signed up for a five-year stint with the U.S. Army. Perhaps the most continual thread running through Edgar Allan Poe's love life, from beginning to end, was a woman named Sarah Elmira Royster Shelton. She was, essentially, Poe's first and last love. Unfortunately, the two never married, and their relationship always hit. When you hear about famous artists who, despite changing the world, struggled to catch a break, well, Edgar Allan Poe should be near the top of the list. Despite Poe's magnificent talent, and a fierce desire for success, he spent much of his life in poverty, and his work was consistently undervalued. The heartbreaking deaths that Edgar Allan Poe faced in his life — to say nothing of his own death — were far more than ordinary. Looking past the early deaths of his parents and Mrs. Stanard, another tragedy in the young Poe's life was the loss of his foster mother, Frances, who loved him like John Allan didn't. Needless to say, Edgar Allan Poe had a hard life. He suffered from a lack of unconditional love, a troubled upbringing, and no reliable support system. Because of these struggles, according to Britannica, he often turned to alcohol, particularly when dealing with stressful social situations that required him to be in a good mood around people. While it's impossible to properly diagnose someone who lived hundreds of years ago, it does seem likely that Poe was an alcoholic. He drank more often than his peers, and while he didn't usually reach the point of being inebriated, his drunken instances always seemed to occur, embarrassingly enough, on the public stage. Edgar Allan Poe was only 40 when he died, less than two weeks away from marrying his beloved Sarah. He was young, destitute for much of his life, criticized by his peers, and often unhappy.
