Edgar Allan Poe Biography PDF

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Edgar Allan Poe Biography...

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Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 to October 7, 1849) was an American writer, poet, critic and editor best known for evocative short stories and poems that captured the imagination and interest of readers around the world. His imaginative storytelling and tales of mystery and horror gave birth to the modern detective story. Many of Poe’s works, including “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” became literary classics. Some aspects of Poe’s life, like his literature, is shrouded in mystery, and the lines between fact and fiction have been blurred substantially since his death. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States and American literature as a whole, and he was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story. Poe is generally considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre and is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career. Poe self-published his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, in 1827. His second poetry collection, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, was published in 1829. As a critic at the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond from 1835 to 1837, Poe published some of his own works in the magazine, including two parts of his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. In late 1830s, Poe published Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, a collection of short stories. It contained several of his most spine-tingling tales, including "The Fall of the House of Usher," "Ligeia" and "William Wilson." In 1841, Poe launched the new genre of detective fiction with "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." His literary innovations earned him the nickname "Father of the Detective Story." A writer on the rise, he won a literary prize in 1843 for "The Gold Bug," a suspenseful tale of secret codes and hunting treasure. Edgar Allan Poe's best known fiction works are Gothic, a genre that he followed to appease the public taste. His most recurring themes deal with questions of death, including its physical signs, the effects of decomposition, concerns of premature burial, the reanimation of the dead, and mourning. Many of his works are generally considered part of the dark romanticism genre, a literary reaction to transcendentalism which Poe strongly disliked. He referred to followers of the transcendental movement as "Frog-Pondians", after the pond on Boston Common,and ridiculed their writings as "metaphor—run mad," lapsing into "obscurity for obscurity's sake" or "mysticism for mysticism's sake".[87] Poe once wrote in a letter to Thomas Holley Chivers that he did not dislike Transcendentalists, "only the pretenders and sophists among them" Beyond horror, Poe also wrote satires, humor tales, and hoaxes. For comic effect, he used irony and ludicrous extravagance, often in an attempt to liberate the reader from cultural conformity.[84] "Metzengerstein" is the first story that Poe is known to have published and his first foray into horror, but it was originally intended as a burlesque satirizing the popular genre. Poe also reinvented science fiction, responding in his writing to emerging technologies such as hot air balloons in "The BalloonHoax". Poe wrote much of his work using themes aimed specifically at mass-market tastes. To that end, his fiction often included elements of popular pseudosciences, such as phrenology and physiognomy. Contributing greatly to the genres of horror and science fiction, Poe is now considered the father of the modern detective story and highly lauded as a poet. Other items that students familiar about Poe are Edgar Allan Poe’s House and Museum located in the Baltimore home where Edgar Allan Poe stayed from 1831 to 1835 with his aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter, Poe’s cousin and future wife Virginia, is now a museum. The Edgar Allan Poe House’s selfguided tour features exhibits on Poe’s foster parents, his life and death in Baltimore and the poems and short stories he wrote while living there, as well as memorabilia including his chair and desk.

There are few details that the author uses to create an atmosphere of horror in “The Tell Tale Heart”. First, point of view contributes in creating the spooky mood of The Tell-Tale Heart. Poe used firstperson point of view – that is, the narrator himself is the protagonist. The story that the narrator tells is his own story – how he committed a crime, how he confessed a crime. Therefore, as the narrator talks, readers are able to grasp the protagonist’s emotions on his actions very clearly. In the story, the narrator’s feeling toward the old man whom he murdered is quite irrational. A normal person has a clear reason for loving someone, but the narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart does not; instead, he only stated “[I] loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult”. The fact that narrator just loved the old man because the man was an unrelated person who does not bother the narrator implies that narrator is different from normal person, which creates spooky ambience. Also, the narrator’s reason for killing the old man was just because he felt fright and hatred toward the old man’s eye – “the eye of a vulture – a pale blue eye, with a film over it”. The narrator believed that if he kills the old man, the evil eye would be separated from the virtuous old man whom he loves. However, the evil eye was a part of the old man’s identity; the point that the narrator did not understand the combination of virtue and evil, so tried to separate it by killing shows his madness – which is, of course, suspenseful. How the narrator felt when he first recognized the old man’s heartbeat – which was, actually, hallucinations – is also mysterious. First, he was talking with officers of the police very fluently and naturally, but as he recognized the sound, the narrator “grew very pale, … talked more fluently with a heightened voice” to hide the embarrassment and fear he felt. As the sound grew larger and larger, the narrator suspected that the policemen already heard the sound, but pretended that they didn’t with “hypocritical smiles”, to let him confess, and finally the narrator surrendered to his own guess. What made the narrator to confess – “I admit the deed!” – was merely own assumption. This shows the narrator’s delusion, which again adds abnormal mood to the story. Imagery also plays critical role in creating ambience and tension. Imagery is a writing technique that appeals images attended by five senses – sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. In The Tell-Tale Heart, sight imagery and sound imagery are used most frequently. For sight imagery, how narrator behaves – “Every night, about midnight, I turned the latch of his door and opened it – oh so gently! … I moved it slowly – very, very slowly, so that I might not disturb the old man’s sleep” is undoubtfully frightening. The narrator seems to be committing crime – his behavior resembles that of stalker, a crime-er, who secretly keeps a person under delicate observation. Also, the “eye of a vulture – a pale blue eye, with a film over it” – is also scary sight imagery, since vulture, a large bird living in hot countries and eating flesh of death animals, is a symbol of death, destroy and fear. The fact that the old man’s room was “as black as pitch with the thick darkness” symbolizes similar concepts, too. By indicating crime, death and darkness via sight imagery of how does the narrator act or observe the old man, the story forms ominous atmosphere. How does the narrator ‘talk’ and ‘hear’ compose important sound imagery. The narrator starts his story in this speech; “TRUE! – nervous – very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?”. Use of hyphens and semicolons give impression that the narrator is notbeing-concise, but actually severely stammering. This makes the readers to think the narrator is anxious, manic, lunatic, or even unconscious. Moreover, the fact that the narrator is listening to auditory hallucination is also fearful – as the narrator sits in front of the police, chatting cheerily to conceal his murder, he realized that he fancied a “ringing in ears … became more distinct”. It was “a low, dull, quick sound – much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton”. The narrator concluded that it was “the beating of [the old man’s] hideous heart”, and finally, confessed his own crime. The fact that an imaginary sound drove the narrator to spit out the truth creates tension; also, that the sound rose and became more intense adds suspense. Poe, the author, used three literary devices – point of view and imagery – very effectively to create dark and gloomy ambience and thrilling suspense. Thus, it is evident that The Tell-Tale Heart is a representative work in Gothic tradition, since it contains all important elements of Gothic literature....