The poet and short story writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is credited by the transformation of the short story from anecdote to art. He is often designated as the originator of the modern short story. Poe was born in Boston in January 19, 1809 to actor parents who soon died leaving their three year old son to the care of a merchant from Richmond. At the age of 18, Poe set out to earn his living by literary craft. Poe 's talent has profoundly influenced literature. With The Murder in the Rue Morgue and other stories, he was the first to write detective stories in America. Poe was called the father of science fiction. He combined the intensely psychological and the Gothic with the rational and Romantic to create horror in his short stories. …show more content…
There is a degree of identification between the author and the characters of his stories. Although madness is employed as in many of Poe 's stories as a central theme, the three selected tales in this study are extremely effective examples. In the three short stories, the protagonists are completely insane though for different reasons. This paper aims at examining the disturbed states of mind of the protagonists and the consequences of their insanity. Moreover, the impact of madness as a device of terror on the reader is also …show more content…
Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a stupid action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not. Have we not a perpetual inclination in the teeth of our best judgment to violate that which is law merely because we understand it to be such?... It was this unfathomable longing of the soul to offer violence to its own nature, to do wrong for all the wrong 's sake only- that urged me to continue. (BC,