Childhood Environment In Edgar Allan Poe

Most Influential Author in the World Edgar Allen Poe uses layered irony and complex symbolism in his short stories and poems in order to take his readers on a whirlwind of elaborate, captivating and suspenseful journeys. Poe was born on January 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts. His childhood was depressing and disheartening. His parents died before he was three years old and John and Frances Allan raised him as a foster child. John Allan was a prosperous tobacco exporter, so he was able to send Poe to the best boarding schools and later to the University of Virginia.

Jocelyn Brown Ms. Taylor Honors English 9 February 7th, 2018 Rebirth and Sacrifice 1789. The French Revolution is preparing to start and many lives will be taken. This historic event lives on as a man named Charles Dickens writes and publishes a historical fiction based around this Revolution. Dickens has written a beautifully plotted book with many secrets to uncover and brand new events around every corner. Growing up as a young boy was pretty rough for him, as he faced conflicts with his family and with finances.

This early childhood may have influenced his point of view to be rather dark, grim, and covert, as his writing reflects the hardships in his childhood. Stories and poems such as The Cask of Amontillado, The Tell-Tale Heart, and Annabel Lee are all works that will never be forgotten. For decades he has written various wondrous stories that entice readers to be pulled into the grim tales

He was capable of writing angelic or weird poetry, with a supreme sense of rhythm and word appeal. Many believe these stories written by Poe come from the women in his life who have passed. Edgar Allan Poe faced many deaths of women he loved. Britannica states that at a young age his birth mother, Elizabeth, died in Richmond Virginia. Following the death of his mother, Poe was taken into the home of John Allan and his wife Frances, who later died of tuberculosis.

Allan was there for Edgar at all times, though sometimes he did not approve of Edgar’s decisions, Allan supported him. Edgar Allan Poe started publishing in 1827, he started publishing some of his classics such as “Tell-tale-heart”, “The Raven”, and “Berenice”. Due to Edgar’s lack of money, he was only able to go to the University of Virginia for a semester. Henry David Thoreau and Edgar Allan Poe were to complete different people but both had support from relatives and friends. Though Edgar was not very wealthy, he was very successful due to his writing and his artistic skills.

Although Nathaniel Hawthorne didn’t seem to go through as much as Edgar Allan Poe in his life, having to only really worry about financial issues and his father passing away during his childhood, he still seemed to ponder on the darkness within humans. However, while Poe based his stories on certain elements of his life, Hawthorne seems to write about human nature simply because writers in those days got famous by being transcendentalists. In fact Hawthorne, wasn’t even interested in Romanticism, if not for his wife-to-be at the time. According to Biography.com, “Nathaniel Hawthorne ended his self-imposed seclusion at home about the same time he met Sophia Peabody, a painter, illustrator, and transcendentalist. During their courtship, Hawthorne spent some time at the Brook Farm community where he got to know Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

In his short story “The fall of the house of Usher,” Edgar allan Poe uses diction to show the negative aspects of society. “Although, as boys, we had been even intimate associates, yet I really knew little of my friend. His reserve had been always excessive and habitual. I was aware, however, that his very ancient family had been noted, time out of mind, for a peculiar sensibility of temperament, displaying itself, through long ages, in many works of exalted art, and manifested, of late, in repeated deeds of munificent yet unobtrusive charity, as well as in a passionate devotion to the intricacies, perhaps even more than to the orthodox and easily recognizable beauties, of musical science.”(Poe 414) Poe uses diction such as ‘excessive’ and ‘habitual’ to give a negative description to show that the narrator, a member of society, did not like the way an individual was. Emerson tends to use diction with more aggressive connotation to get the same idea across.

“A person, who watched the interview between the dead and the living, scrupled not to the affirm that, at the instant when the clergyman’s features were disclosed, the corpse had slightly shuddered, rustling the shroud and muslin cap, though the countenance retained the composure of death.” Nathaniel Hawthorne, born in 1804, had been a descendant of Puritan settlers and had grown up with society constantly beating down on him, because of his family history. After he went to college at Bowdoin College, he had a desire of writing and soon composed a very famous story called The Minister’s Black Veil, This short story depicts two major themes that one can gather from reading this story, them being; standing up to your beliefs or morals can be

Aldous Huxley once said, “If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.” His words mirror the youth of American writer Edgar Allan Poe, as he was unlike the others and therefore isolated from them. In his piece, Poe ponders on the good and the bad that occurred due to this isolation and how it affected his future. The author pours his childhood into his poetic work “Alone,” showing his audience the hardships of a misunderstood orphan. From the poem’s first-person narration the reader can infer that it is a flashback to the author’s childhood. He begins the narrative by explaining how even at a young age, he differed from the other children, how he felt left out and alone.

She even went on to go on to win a National Book Award. Primarily, the author focuses on writing short stories and, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is no different. This story is about a family vacation that goes terribly wrong. From an ill-tempered grandmother with a bad memory to a car accident with a few problematic witnesses the author employees foreshadowing throughout the entire story. O’Connor uses a unique blend of setting, tone, irony, and character development to make this short story a quick yet fascinating read.