Do you know the best Poe stories? Who is Edgar Allan Poe?
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author most known for his stories of mystery and the macabre. He was the first writer in the United States to earn a livelihood solely from his work. The unfortunate outcome was a life of poverty and difficulty for the family. Here we are
His reputation has now grown to include being generally acknowledged as the originator of the detective fiction genre and perhaps having planted the seeds for the creation of the science fiction genre.
Edgar Allan Poe continues to be cited often today, with the Mystery Writers of America awarding an annual Edgar Award for mystery genre literature to honor his contributions. However, he and his work are well-known.
Did you know that there are some interesting facts about Edgar Allan Poe are there. In this article, I will discuss the interesting and weird facts of his life and the best Poe stories.
If you be till the end, I can assure you that you will get to know every detail of Edgar Allan Poe.
Why Is Edgar Allan Poe Interesting?
Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer who lived during the nineteenth century and was considered one of the most significant and influential authors in the world. He was the first novelist to attempt to earn a livelihood as a writer on a professional level. Poe’s writing was heavily influenced by the events that took place in his immediate environment.
What Was It About Edgar Allan Poe That Made Him So Unique?
In addition to his poems and short stories, Poe is most renowned for his tales of mystery and the macabre. A key player in American Romanticism and American literature as a whole, he was also one of the country’s first practitioners of the short tale (he was born in 1830).
What Is It About Poe That Makes Him So Famous?
Edgar Allan Poe is generally regarded as the creator of the contemporary detective tale and a pioneer in the science fiction genre, yet he earned his livelihood as America’s first major literary critic and theorist, a position he held for more than a decade.
Currently, Poe’s fame is founded mainly on his terrifying stories of horror and haunting lyric poetry, both of which he wrote.
What Is Edgar Allan Poe Most Known For?
Poe’s most well-known works are
Poems – To Helen (1831), The Raven(1845), and Annabel Lee (1849)
Short tales of evil and crime- The Tell-Tale Heart (1843) and The Cask of Amontillado (1846). Supernatural horror story -The Fall of the House of Usher (1839).
What Are Five Interesting Facts About Poe?
Discover five interesting facts about Edgar Allan Poe:
1. He was orphaned when he was just three years old.
Edgar Poe was born in Boston in 1809 to actresses Eliza and David Poe, who were also actors. Following the birth of their son, the couple’s relationship was strained. The pair had married just six months before the death of Eliza’s first husband when she was 18 years old.
David developed an unhealthy connection with alcohol due to his jealousy over his wife’s success in the theatre. At only one year old, the Poe patriarch abandoned his job and his family after a difficult few months. Edgar was left without a father.
Unfortunately, Edgar’s misfortune did not stop with this incident. His mother died of TB in 1811, when he was just 24 years old. While his father’s whereabouts were unclear, Edgar, who was only one month short of his third birthday at the time, was essentially left as an orphan. Unfortunately for him, John Allan, a Virginia-based businessman, and his family took him in and raised him as their own. Even though the Allans legally fostered rather than adopted the little child, they gave him the name “Edgar Allan Poe.”
2. The raven, one of his most well-known poems, was immediately a success.
While Poe’s new identity would serve as his legal name for the rest of his life, he began using several pseudonyms in 1827. If you look at his early life, he went by the name “Edgar A. Perry;” when he worked as a newspaper writer, he went by the name “Henri Le Rennet;” and when he published his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, he gave simply the name “a Bostonian” as credit for the work.
During his professional writing career in the 1930s and 1940s, Poe, on the other hand, chose to go by his actual name rather than one he had assumed.
Over this decade, he established a reputation for his literary criticism, which was published in various newspapers and publications. But, most significantly, he became well-known for his narrative poetry, such as The Raven, which was first published in the New York Evening Mirror.
Poe composed The Raven in 1845, intending to create “a poem that should appeal to both the public and the critical taste at the same time.” It is the narrative of a student grieving the loss of his girlfriend in this sad drama.
Amid his sorrow over her death, he is faced by a talking raven, whose continuous repetition of the phrase “nevermore” gradually drives him insane.
The Raven was not the first, nor the last time Poe would write about the death of a young lover, as he would do in other works. Many of Poe’s most well-known works, such as Lenore (which recounts the tale of “the queenliest dead that ever died so young”) and Annabel Lee (which is said to have been inspired by Poe’s real-life wife), include this theme.
3. He Married His Cousin, Who Was 13 Years Old.
Poe met Virginia Clemm, a seven-year-old girl who happened to be his first cousin on his mother’s side, in 1829. After almost six years of living with the child’s family, Poe approached her mother and requested permission to marry the little girl, offering to financially support her and her extremely impoverished family in exchange for her consent.
She consented, and the next year, the 27-year-old tied the knot with the 13-year-old. It was 11 years later that Clemm died as a result of TB that they were still married.
Historians today are divided on the degree to which they were romantically involved with one another, with many believing that they had a connection similar to that of a brother and sister.
The prevalence of such arrangements is also debated; although some believe that first-cousin weddings were not uncommon during this period, many others believe that their age disparity would have been regarded odd at the time.
4. The reason for his death is currently undiscovered.
As a result of Clemm’s sickness, Poe suffered greatly. As she became more ill, he started consuming alcohol.
Even though it was at this period that The Raven established him as a household name, Clemm died only two years after the poem was published and left him with no way to enjoy and cope with his newfound celebrity.
Poe’s mental condition began to worsen progressively. In 1849, a man came upon him roaming the streets of Baltimore, confused and half-conscious of his surroundings.
He seemed to be wearing someone else’s clothes, and he kept shouting out the name “Reynolds.” It was a strange sight to see. Even though the delirious 40-year-old was brought to the hospital immediately, he died the next morning.
What was the underlying cause of the death? No one knows what happened today. Strangely, all medical documents have been destroyed, and there seems to be no trace of the death certificate’s existence.
As a result of these circumstances, Poe’s death is considered one of the most enigmatic in literary history—and therefore, a particularly appropriate conclusion for the author.
5. The first professional American writer, he is hailed as the Father of the American Novel.
To this day, Poe is hailed for his unique writing style and his groundbreaking approach to poetry and short fiction. He lived and worked in the United States does not detract from his international reputation; in fact, he is especially well-known in France, owing to an intensive translation effort by the 19th-century poet Charles Baudelaire.
In addition to his popularity in the United Kingdom, Poe is also popular in the United States. He is widely regarded as the country’s first professional writer after building out a distinguished career as a renowned critic and subsisting solely on the profits from his work as a poet and novelist.
On the other hand, Poe was not motivated to write by a desire to achieve professional success but rather by a passion for the craft itself.
For him, poetry was not a goal but rather a passion. He said in 1845, “Poetry has been not a goal, but a passion and the passions should be kept in reverence: they must not — they cannot be aroused at whim with an eye on the paltry compensations, or the much pallier commendations, of humanity.”
Edgar Allan Poe Fun Facts
- He was a prolific writer
- He invented a whole new field of study
- A Shakespearean character is most likely the inspiration for his given name.
- In the Poe family, poetry and the pen ran in the blood.
- He was raised as an orphan
- Poverty served as his inspiration.
- He was considered a Prodigy
- He had been Disinherited
What Weird Things Did Edgar Allan Poe Do?
- His conflict with the city of Boston.
- He was the bloodthirsty inspiration for the film “The Masque of Red Death.
- He was the inventor of body horror.
- For most of his life, the iconic mustache remained absent.
- He became a member of Alcoholics Anonymous.
What Are Some Facts About Edgar Allan Poe’s Childhood?
His father and mother worked as touring performers. The family was living in squalor. By 1811, Edgar Poe’s father had abandoned the family, leaving Elizabeth Poe to care for him, his older brother Henry, and his baby sister Rosalie, all of whom were two years old. And things just got worse from there.
What Did Edgar Allen Poes Mother Do For A Living?
Elizabeth Arnold Poe was a gorgeous and accomplished actress who captivated the hearts of theatergoers throughout her period. She was born in England and immigrated to the United States with her mother, who happened to be an actress herself, in 1796.
Elizabeth worked as an actor in theatres from Boston to Charleston from when she was nine years old until she died at the age of twenty-four.
Who Was Edgar Allan Poe’s Wife?
Virginia Clemm and Poe were first cousins, and they were publicly married when Virginia Clemm was 13 and Poe was 27 years old.
What Did Poe’s Mother Do For A Living?
Edgar Allan Poe’s mother was an actress.
Best Poe Stories
- The Cask of Amontillado
- The Fall of the House of Usher
- The Pit and the Pendulum
- William Wilson
- The Murders in the Rue Morgue
- The Black Cat
- The Masque of the Red Death
- The Tell-Tale Heart
Edgar Allan Poe Education
Edgar Allan Poe attended college but did not complete his studies. In 1826, he enrolled in the University of Virginia but dropped out after a year.
Who Did Poe Marry, And What Happened To Her?
Poe’s wife, Virginia Eliza Clemm (née Clemm; August 15, 1822 – January 30, 1847), was Edgar Allan Poe’s second wife. Virginia Clemm and Poe were first cousins, and they were publicly married when Virginia Clemm was 13 and Poe was 27 years old.
Edgar Allan Poe Death Date
On October 7, he passed away. According to an enigmatically worded article in a Baltimore newspaper, the reason was “congestion of the brain.” Several hypotheses have been proposed as to the reason for Poe’s death. The most well-known is that he died as a result of problems related to his drinking.
Conclusion
Edgar Allan Poe’s work had a significant impact on Gothic and macabre literature long after his death, and it continued to captivate readers today. Even though his personality was mainly created by those who wrote about him, his image has endured as a symbol of mystery.
Even after his death, a medium claimed that she had received poems dictated by him. His fiancée, following his first wife’s death (Sarah Helen Wightman), said that she believed his soul was attempting to contact her via the medium.
Some of them may be wishful thinking, but for the time being, here are the top ten interesting facts about Poe!
I hope you found this article about Edgar Allan Poe’s facts about his life to be informative.
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