The stories of Edgar Allan Poe are so filled with cruelty and sadism as to suggest a psychological unbalance on the part of the author. His violent themes - a tortured prisoner in a dungeon of the Inquisition, a man plastered alive into the wall of a tomb, the brutal murder of a cat by its crazed owner, and a man viciously killed because of his vulture eye - raise questions about the author's motivation - was it literary or personal? A study of Poe's life suggests that his obsession with violence and terror was not a reflection of the current literary movement, but a reflection of his own tortured psyche.
Poe was raised in an atmosphere of death and alienation. His mother died when he was three-years-old, leaving him an orphan - his father having long since disappeared. He was raised by foster parents in an affluent setting. Though the Allans were affectionate, they never legally adopted him and they often reminded him of his "place." As Poe grew older, the distance between Mr. Allan and him steadily increased until an irreparable fission developed. Poe was further affected by the premature death of a friend's mother, who had made a deep impression on him, and later, the death of his wife at a very young age.
Many critics dismiss the personal motivation theory, arguing that Poe was merely capitalizing on a popular topic of his day. During the mid-nineteenth century, death was a prominent topic among many of the leading writers. This was an age recently freed from premature death by advances in medicine, freed from the terror of death by war, and free in its sheer immunity to write about death in its many forms. The fact that Poe chose to write exclusively about death, ruling out other prevalent themes of the period, demonstrates more than an indifferent decision to write on a popular subject. The darkness of Poe's stories, whether conscious or not, reflect the bitterness and paranoia that ate away at his own soul.