the title page only as "a Bostonian." This little book did not sell at all, but its few surviving copies are among the most highly prized items in the rare-book market; one accidentally discovered copy, bought for a dollar, was recently auctioned for $150,000. Poe's military career went more successfully. After two years, he had been promoted to sergeant major, the highest noncommissioned rank. He was honorably discharged in 1829, and decided to seek an appointment to West Point in the hope of becoming a career commissioned officer. He entered West Point in May of 1830, but chafed under the regimen and, after deliberately missing classes, roll-calls, and compulsory chapel attendance, was expelled in January 1831.
In 1829, Poe had published a second collection of verse, which attracted little more attention than its predecessor. A third volume, funded through contributions from fellow cadets, appeared in 1831. Among its contents was "To Helen," which had been inspired by Jane Stanard, the mother of one his Richmond schoolmates. Poe referred to her as "the first, purely ideal love of my soul." Also in 1831, Poe went to Baltimore, where he moved in with his widowed aunt Maria Clemm, his father's sister, who was to be the most deeply devoted of his several mother-figures, and her eight-year-old daughter Virginia. It was in this period that he began to achieve wider recognition as a writer. In 1832, he published five tales in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier. In 1833, he entered a competition sponsored by the Baltimore Saturday Visiter (sic), winning the second prize in poetry for "The Coliseum" and the first prize in fiction for "MS. Found in a Bottle." In 1834, the publication of "The Visionary" in Godey's Lady's Book marked the first time that his fiction appeared in a magazine of more than local circulation.
Frances Allan had died in February 1829, and John Allan, who was by this time permanently alienated from Poe, had remarried in October 1830. On Allan's death in 1834, Poe received nothing. Effectively disinherited, unsuited for business or the military, Poe turned to journalism, the one avenue likely to afford a successful career to someone of his interests and abilities. Through the recommendation of the novelist John Pendleton Kennedy, who had been one of the judges of the Saturday Visiter contest, Poe began in March 1835 to contribute short fiction and book reviews to the Richmond-based Southern Literary Messenger. In a period of American literature not notable for them, Poe exhibited coherent aesthetic principles and high critical standards, and within months his vigorous and uncompromising reviews began to increase the Messenger's circulation and to enhance its reputation, prompting its publisher to make Poe his principal book reviewer and editorial assistant. By the end of the year, Poe, who had moved to Richmond with Virginia and Mrs. Clemm, was named editor in chief. In May of 1836, he secretly married Virginia, his first cousin, who was then not quite fourteen years of age.
Dissatisfied both with his salary and with limits on his editorial independence, he resigned from the Southern Literary Messenger in January 1837. Struggling to support Virginia and Mrs. Clemm through freelance writing, he moved his family first to New York and then to Philadelphia as he sought another editorial position. Despite financial difficulties, Poe was able in this period to advance his own writing career, publishing reviews,
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