After a restless period of travelling, Petőfi attended college at Pápa, where he met Mór Jókai. A year later in 1842, his poem “A borozó” (The Wine Drinker) was first published in the literary magazine Athenaeum under the name Sándor Petrovics. On 3 November the same year, he published the poem under the surname “Petőfi” for the first time.

Petőfi was more interested in the theatre. In 1842 he joined a travelling theatre, but had to leave it to earn money. He wrote for a newspaper, but could not make enough money. Malnourished and sick, he went to Debrecen, where his friends helped him get back on his feet.

In 1844 he walked from Debrecen to Pest to find a publisher for his poems and he succeeded. His poems were becoming increasingly popular. He relied on folkloric elements and popular, traditional song-like verses.

In 1846, he met Júlia Szendrey in Transylvania. They married the next year, despite the opposition of her father, and spent their honeymoon at the castle of Count Sándor Teleki [hu]), the only aristocrat among Petőfi’s friends. Their only son Zoltán was born on 15 December 1848.

Petőfi joined the Hungarian Revolutionary Army and fought under the Polish Liberal General Józef Bem, in the Transylvanian army. The army was initially successful against Habsburg troops, but after Tsar Nicholas I of Russia intervened to support the Habsburgs, they were defeated. Petőfi was last seen alive in the Battle of Segesvár on 31 July 1849.

Although for many years his death at Segesvár had been assumed, in the late 1980s Soviet investigators found archives that revealed that after the battle about 1,800 Hungarian prisoners of war were marched to Siberia. Alternative theories suggest that he was one of them and died of tuberculosis in 1856. In 1990, an expedition was organised to Barguzin, Buryatia, Siberia, where archaeologists claimed to have unearthed Petőfi’s skeleton. Furthermore, in Hungary they have a saying after him: “Eltűnt, mint Petőfi a ködben” (Disappeared, like Petőfi in the fog).

In 1911, a statue of Sándor Petőfi was erected in Pressburg (Pozsony, present-day Bratislava), on the Main Square. In 1918, after the army of the newly independent First Czechoslovak Republic occupied the city, the statue was dynamited. After this sculpture was boarded over round temporarily until its removal, and replaced with a statue of Slovak poet Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav. Today, there is a statue of Petőfi in the Medic Garden (Medická záhrada).