Edgar Allan Poe Research Paper

Edgar Allan Poe an American author best known for his macabre works like the Tell Tale Heart and The Fall of the House of Usher. He was also recognized as the father of the modern detective story and science fiction. Most of Poe’s writings are riddled with death, madness and the occasional obsessive-compulsive disorder. Many believe that Poe works are an imitation of his life. Many thought Poe to be an alcoholic, addict, and psychopath these assumptions and stories still follow him even after his death. In order to better understand what drove Poe to the darkness, we first ought to look into his beginnings. Poe was born the middle child of David and Elizabeth Poe in Boston. His Father had left a promising law career to become an actor, he

Poe was never formally adopted by the Allan’s, but he did take their last name as his middle name. to be like his childhood hero British poet Lord Byron. Many time Mr. Allan found Poe’s writing scribbled on the back of ledger pages. In 1826, Poe entered the University of Virginia, he excelled in his classes, but soon turned to gambling to raise funds to cover his expenses. Allan would not fund Poe’s endeavor so after racking up a gambling debt he was forced to leave school. Humiliated he returned home, only to discover that his fiancée had become engaged to another man. His foster mother had also passed away from tuberculosis. We can make a conservative assumption this is where Poe develop his abandonment issues and obsession with

The all-consuming feeling that you have no control of the world around you, so he turns to what he able to control the drink and the drugs. Using anything to quiet the madness in his head. This madness can also be seen in The Tell Tale Heart, where the narrator of had heighten hearing along with the fear he felt from the old man’s eye. Poe could be describing how he felt when he was on the wagon. He suffered from hallucinations and epileptic seizures, though in his time this was diagnosed as pathological intoxication, we better know it as delirium tremors , this was expressed by Bazil in 1999, he believed Poe may have had temporal epilepsy due to extended alcohol abuse (Bazil 741). Poe was the first author to first publish scientific medical diagnosis in his literature. The Business Man published after post death was based on the story of Finis Gage’s accident of when he was impaled through the head with a taping iron, after the accident he was often described as not Gage. Like Poe, Gage suffered from intense mood swings caused from frontal lobe damage, correlation between the two is how Poe may have been physically abused by his nanny, speculating the he may have been hit about the head as a child which resulted also in frontal lobe damage. This is also related in The Fall of the House of Usher, and was described