A writer of novels, short stories, reviews, poetry and other works, Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809 and died October 7, 1849 (Edgar 2004, 1). Despite his premature death, Poe is considered one of the greatest writers of all time. His parents were actors who died when he was a young boy, leaving Poe to live with a merchant named John Allan, from who Poe took his middle name. Thrown out of the University of Virginia for owing gambling debts, serving in the U.S. Army under a phony name and age, and dishonorably discharged from West Point for ôintentional neglectö of his duties, Poe struggled to make his way (Edgar 2004, 1). He won a prize of $50 for his short story called MS Found in a Bottle, thus beginning a career of magazine journalism.
In 1836, Poe married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm, who died six years later from tuberculosis (Edgar 2004, 1). One of PoeÆs most famous poems, Annabel Lee, is directed to Clemm. Despite a descent into alcoholism, drug abuse, depression and eventually madness, Poe remained a prolific writer whose stories often involved deductive reasoning in the mystery detective mode. Common themes in PoeÆs stories included revenge, unhappy marriage, premature burial, murder and entombment. In 1848, after attending a party, Poe left to see his fiancTe in Richmond. He was found delirious in a Baltimore gutter, and died shortly after on October 7, 1849.
The often macabre stories of Poe illustrate his mastery of sensory language and imagery. So, too, the works demonstrate PoeÆs fascination with the conscious and unconscious mind, one often in conflict with itself. PoeÆs characters often transform from a surface appearance of normality to one of psychopathology. In The Black Cat, his narrator known for ôdocility of humanityàdisposition, [and] tenderness of heartö to one who kills his favorite cat and murders his wife (Poe 1978, 849).
In other Poe tales, we often find the...