A boy of nearly three sat in a rented room above a Richmond shop while his mother died of tuberculosis. She had been an actress since the age of nine. His father, an actor too, had walked out the year before and was never reliably seen again. Within weeks the boy was living in a merchant's house, wearing good clothes, answering to a new last name — one no court ever made his. That gap, between being taken in and being claimed, shaped the next seventeen years. This is the story of Edgar Allan Poe before he was famous. It follows him across the Atlantic at six and back again at eleven, through a cold Scottish schoolroom and an English boarding school with a spiked gate, into a Richmond that had firm opinions about the son of two stage performers. He swam six miles down the James River on a bet. He stood in a boys' militia honor guard when Lafayette came to town. He finished top of his class at Thomas Jefferson's brand-new university and was pulled out anyway, over debts his guardian refused to pay. At eighteen he walked out of the only house he had, spent a night on the street, and got himself to Boston with almost nothing. He printed a book of poems there that nobody bought, and he did not put his name on it. Weeks later he enlisted in the army under a name he invented. Written for readers nine to twelve, this biography treats them as capable of handling the real record — including the parts historians argue about. It's careful to separate what documents prove from what people remembered fifty years later, and it doesn't leave out the uncomfortable material: the enslaved people in the household that raised him, the guardian who wrote that the boy had not a spark of affection in him, the letters a father intercepted. Twenty-nine chapters, each with an original illustration. Includes a timeline, a guide to the people in Poe's life, a glossary, a list of places you can still visit, and a closing note on how any of this can be checked.