Edgar Allan Poe Influences

The human mind is one of the most intricate structures that God has ever created. Understanding that each and every individual holds their own thought pattern with varying degrees of complexity is difficult. Nothing has more influence over a person greater than the influences of the mind. It is responsible for behavior, which then turns into characteristic habits. Psychology as we know it today has only been in practice since the early 1900’s. Before this science came to fruition several authors delved into the theories of how the mind worked. At the top of that list of authors is Edgar Allan Poe, the founder of the “short story” and the mystery murder story. Poe seems to have been overly aware of how the nuances of the mind worked and what

He was born to traveling actors, his parents separated early on, his mother died and he was taken into foster care by the age of three. He was very talented scholastically, athletically and even went on in the military. He lost is foster mother and a strain was upon his and his foster father, who remarried and came into money, leaving Poe to fend for himself. Allan even went so far as to write Poe out of his will entirely. He struggled with excessive drinking and opiates causing him to lose many jobs. He married his thirteen year old cousin, who died only a short time later of Tuberculosis. At the end of his life he was trying to get on the path of the straight and narrow. He was set to marry a lady of wealth and went up to Philadelphia for an editorial job. He was found drunk, beaten and broke in Baltimore. No one knows exactly what happened to him, even in death Poe is shrouded in mystery. Even though he was a major contributor to the literary community, he was not looked upon with great admiration among his peers in America, for he was combative and alienated people. His work would be looked at as a direct mirror of his life that he was an alcoholic and an agonizing loner who wrote about characters going beyond the brink of sanity. There are critics today that have to wonder with all the precise details and the inner workings of the madness within crimes committed in his stories, if his stories were a confession to actual crimes that he himself