What Tragic Childhood Events Influenced Poe and Shaped his Chilling Tales

Introduction

Imagine living in a time-era when horror stories were not known. The first person that did that would most definitely be called crazy. Well, Edgar Allan Poe was just that.

Tragedy and Early Losses

He made chilling stories that scared people. Being the man to create scary poetry brought many good things in his life and bad things. Edgar was born in 1809; little did he know what a difference he would make in American literature.

Edgar Allan Poe did not have an easy life.

They were poor, and they couldn’t afford a lot of things. In fact, his tragic childhood could have been why he wrote disturbing stories. When he was a child, both his mother and father died of tuberculosis. This is already a horrible childhood, but just wait. His foster mother and father raised him very well, but when Poe developed gambling in college, he went $2,000 into debt, his father wouldn’t give him the money, so he cut them out of his life; his father then died a few years later. Fast forward, he ended up marrying his cousin, she was 13, and he was 27. She ended up dying of tuberculosis, leaving him stranded, all alone with just him and his thoughts. His tragic childhood and adulthood was motivation to write those stories. His most famous one is “The Raven,” which really shows his emotion and what goes on in his mind.

Edgar’s most famous work was a book titled “The Raven” He also has a story called “The Tell-Tale Heart” He has many more, but those are the most loved by people. Each one tells a very scary, messed-up story. People ate it up, and they looked forward to his work. Edgar was depressed; anyone would be under the circumstances, but that led him to a mysterious death. Nobody knows the cause of his death, he was found with clothes that weren’t his own, and he was unconscious.

Conclusion

Everyone was devastated, and they mourned his death. In conclusion, Edgar lived a horrible life, filled with death, sickness, and losing people left and right. He did make a huge difference in American literature, though; without him, things wouldn’t be the same. We wouldn’t have scary stories, movies, or a sense of fright when reading a story. Without him, things would be so different. A legend died, and his stories still carry on many centuries later.

References

1. “Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography” by Arthur Hobson Quinn

2. “Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living” by Paul Collins

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