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Edgar Allan Poe Many authors have made great contributions to the world of literature. One of these is Edgar Allan Poe. Poe is known as the father of the American short story, as well as the father of the detective story. But who was Edgar Allan Poe? What was the man himself actually like? These questions may be answered in part, but the whole truth of Edgar Allan Poe s life can never be known for sure, and maybe this is exactly how he wanted it.
The brilliance of his work, however is indisputable, and Edgar Allan Poe is known throughout the world for his works. By his use of horror, humor, darkness, sarcasm, and the ridiculous he has been the inspiration of many famous authors, and this surly will continue to for many years to come. Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809, to David and Elizabeth Poe. He had one brother, William, born on January 30, 1807, and one sister, Rosalie, born on December 20, 1810. Shortly after the birth of Rosalie, David Poe abandoned his young wife and children. Suffering from tuberculosis, Mrs.
Poe came to Richmond with her two youngest children. The oldest boy, William, had been left with relatives in Baltimore. Shortly after her arrival in Richmond, Elizabeth Poe died. Edgar, known for being a handsome little boy, was taken in by Mr. and Mrs. John Allan.
Rosalie was taken by another family. Mrs. Allan soon became very attached to Edgar and wanted to formally adopt him, but her husband refused to take this step. It has been said that his disapproval of actors and the acting profession (both of Poe s parents were in the theater) was the reason for his not wanting to adopt Poe. At the age of six, Edgar moved with his foster family to England, where they lived for about five years. At this time, the Allan's and Poe returned to Richmond, where they remained until Poe went away to college.
The reckless activities of Poe while in college angered his foster father so much that he refused to pay for any more of Poe s schooling. Poe returned home for a short time and then enlisted in the army. Poe at first did very well in the military and was promoted several times. He began to become unhappy in the Army, and was eventually able to persuade his foster father to give him money which with he was able to purchase his way out of the military. Not long after leaving the Army, Poe gained entrance to West Point.
He decided he didn t like this style of military life much sooner than before and misbehaved so badly that he was thrown out of West Point. Unfortunately, this was around this same time that Poe s foster mother died. Since she was the only one who was able to bridge the huge gap between Poe and Mr. Allan, it was now that almost all contact between the two ceased. When Mr. Allan died he left no mention whatsoever of Poe in his will.
At this point in his life Poe decided to make a career of writing, and publishes Al Array, Tamerlane and Minor Poems in Baltimore in 1829. In 1831 Poe submits several of his works to a contest. He doesn t win, but they publish several of his stories without his name. He was finally successful in winning a contest in 1833. He won $ 50. 00 for his story, MS. Found in a Bottle.
After moving to Richmond, Poe became editor of the Southern Literary Messenger. He remained here for about a year. In 1836, Poe took his newlywed wife, Virginia, and his Aunt Clemm with him to New York. (Virginia was his Aunt Clemm s daughter, so therefore she was his cousin as well. ) After a short time in New York, Poe again moved his family, this time to Philadelphia. It was here in Philadelphia that Poe started to become known for his literary work. He won several prizes for his work and became the editor of certain papers.
In 1846, Poe moved his family back to New York. Here Poe s wife Virginia dies of tuberculosis in 1847. The death of his wife was supposedly very hard on Poe. After her death he moved back to Richmond for a short time. It was near this time that he was finally beginning to be recognized and applauded for his work.
Sadly this lasted for a very brief time, because Edgar Allan Poe s life ended in Baltimore on October 7, 1849. One thing that can be said for certain about Edgar Allan Poe is that almost nothing can be said for certain about Edgar Allan Poe. In the researching of this paper I came across so many different accounts of his life, so many discrepancies in dates, and so many different descriptions of his personality that I began to get very confused, and began to despair of ever being able to write a through and accurate account of his life and work. Eventually I realized that no one could write a complete and factual account of the life of Edgar Allan Poe. After I accepted this fact I was able to continue in my exploration of him. There is a great deal of information about Poe, but very few verifiable facts.
Everything about him is controversial, literally from the place and date of his birth to the exact location and date of his burial. (Poe Society, Biography, p. 1) Some of the many disputed facts and rumors about Poe s life include; the exact date of his birth, the legitimacy of his younger sister, the date of the death of his mother, his birthplace, the reason for his leaving college, his reasons for leaving certain jobs, his use of alcohol and drugs, and of course the most widely disputed area of his life, his death. Everyone agrees that Poe was found on a street in Baltimore in a very distressing condition. (Poe Society, Poe s Death, p. 2) It is also widely agreed upon that his clothing had been changed from his usual black, wool suit to very old, ragged, and stained clothing. From the Baltimore street Poe was taken to Washington College Hospital were he stayed until his death on October 7, 1849. How he came to be in the condition he was found in, and what caused his death, is something that no one can claim to be truly certain of. Why was Poe found in the street in other clothing than his own? What was the reason for his delirium?
It has been said that Poe was reportedly ill at many different times in his life, and wrote to Maria Clemm, on July, 1849 that I have been so ill have had the cholera, or spasms quite as bad, and can now hardly hold the pen (Ostrom, Letters, p. 452). The type of illnesses said to have plagued Poe include; the overall effects of alcohol and drugs, lesions on the brain, brain fever, heart disease, cholera, a rare enzyme disorder, tuberculosis, epilepsy, diabetes, and, most recently, rabies. What exactly happened to him in the hours prior to his being found on the street is unknown as well. Some say that he was simply intoxicated, while others claim that he was drunk as well as under the influence of opium. Some assert that Poe, after drinking more that he should have, was mugged and beaten. Others say that he was bribed with alcohol and then forced brutally to vote repeatedly. (This means of getting extra votes for a candidate was called cooping. ) Judging by the numerous different accounts and lack of sufficient evidence, the mystery behind Edgar Allan Poe s death may never be revealed.
Ironically, it is my own, and many other s opinion, that he would have wanted it no other way. While reading Poe s work for the first time I was struck by how familiar his writings were to many of the short stories included in Alfred Hitchcock s Mystery Magazine. I had found several copies of this magazine in a thrift store and happily read every one of the short stories contained in them. The dates on the magazines ranged from April 1967 to June 1988. While the stories included in these magazines were written by others, they had to be approved of by Hitchcock himself. Each of the magazines had a small introduction in them written by Hitchcock as well.
The dry, slightly sarcastic, tone of Hitchcock s writings in relevance to the strange and abnormal is very much the same as the style of Poe, and of the many other authors who s names appear above Poe s works. The influence Poe had on many of the mystery and detective short stories included in Hitchcock s magazine are quite easily recognized. While his style of writing, especially that of the deductive reasoning of a very keen and observant detective, is often seen and some of his titles are borrowed as well. In one magazine a story called The Purloined Letter is included, and in another a story named The Tale-Tell Heart is featured. Needless to say these stories are very reminiscent of Poe s stories by the same names. The influence of Edgar Allan Poe goes far beyond the genre of mystery and detective stories.
His works have been known to influence the writers of science fiction, horror, and gothic stories as well. Some of these include, Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, and C. S. Lewis. Poe s influence on the writing s of C.
S. Lewis is shown in the story, MS. Found in a Bottle. This story contains an account of a boat sailing into blackness and caught into a current that pulls it toward some unknown, yet horrible fate. The feelings of foreboding and despair in this passage are reflected in a very similar passage written in The Chronicles of Narnia, by C.
S. Lewis. In book three of the series much of the story is written while the characters are at sea. In Lewis s story the main characters boat sails into a dark, horror-filled, unknown place.
All onboard begin to experience dark, foreboding feelings, just like the feelings of the narrator of MS. Found in a Bottle. In this tale, however, the characters manage to find their way out, with a little help from Divine Intervention. Poe s character, on the other hand was not so lucky. The idea of the boat being pulled by a strange current is used throughout Lewis s book as well. The many works of Poe, while all excellent writings, vary greatly in their content and style of writing.
Maybe the pen names Poe used on many of his more outlandish writings showed his own keen awareness of his varying writing styles. The tone of Poe s writings moves along almost the entire length of human emotions. In his stories, The Murder in the Rue Morgue, The Purloined Letter, and The Gold Bug, Poe has been said to have invented the modern day detective story. The suspenseful and deliberate way that Poe leads us down his path to the solution of the mysteries in these stories is a pattern for innumerable mystery and detective writers. His excellent use of suspense and horror is demonstrated in The Pit and the Pendulum, The Mask of Red Death, Morella, and The Cask of Amontillado. He takes this use of suspense and horror and with it weaves the mysteries of human nature and the issue of guilt in such works as The Black Cat and The Tell-Tale Heart.
The dark and foreboding tones in The Imp of the Perverse are almost ridiculed by Poe himself in The Sphinx. In Some Words With a Mummy, Hop-Frog or The Eight Chained Orang-Outangs, and The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, Poe adds touches of humor and pokes fun at most of the characters in these explicit, and sometimes violent, horror stories. He combines this same silly nature with suspense in The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Father.
The total ridiculousness of the narrators in How to Write a Blackwood Article, A predicament, and Why the Frenchman Wears His Arm in a Sling is exposed in their vain, superficial, and ignorant manner of telling their tales. The use of long, senseless words that, when pronounced, say something, is used throughout The Devil In the Belfry. (He does this as well in Some Words With a Mummy. The mummy s name is Allamistakee; in other words, all a mistake. ) Poe shows his romantic side in The Spectacles. This romance is combined with sadness in The Oblong Box and Poe shows us that he is capable of a happy ending in the romance Eleonora.
At the end of my writing about Edgar Allan Poe, I have come to the conclusion that the best way to understand a little about Poe is to read his works. Of the many online works I found that were written by Poe, I downloaded almost all of his short stories and succeeded in reading thirty-two of them. The wide range of his literary style and amazing ability is clearly shown in his many works. Something else notable about Poe is the prolificacy of his work. He managed to write an enormous amount of detailed and intricate stories, not to mention all of his poetry, in a relatively short lifetime.
Writing a paper about Edgar Allan Poe can be in some aspects very challenging because of the many conflicting views and opinions of Poe and his life, but this difficulty is more than adequately compensated for in the quality of his works. Bibliography The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, Inc. : Baltimore Maryland, May 1, 1997, web Lewis, C. S. , The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, New York, New York: Harpercollins Publishers, 1952. Miller, John Carl, Building Poe's Biography, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977. Moran, Dr.
John J. , A Defense of Edgar Allan Poe, Washington D. C. : W. F. Brother, 1885. Philips, Mary Elizabeth, Edgar Allan Poe, The Man, 2 Volumes, Chicago: John C. Winston, 1926.
Quinn, Arthur Hobson, Edgar Allan Poe; A Critical Biography, New York: D. Appleton Century Company, 1941. Thomas, Dwight and David K. Jackson. The Poe Log. Boston: G.
K. Hall &# 038; Co, 1987. Wagenknecht, Edward. Edgar Allan Poe: The Man Behind the Legend. New York: Oxford University Press, 1963.
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