Edgar Allan Poe - Life and Work
...o have remembered as lonely and unhappy. Moreover he didn’t quite get along with his adoptive parents, primarily as far as financial circumstances were concerned. So Edgar had to gamble to put himself through the University of Virginia which he attended for only one year. He had to leave because of his liabilities, for which his adoptive father, although being a well-situated man, refused to pay. In spite or because of those bad experiences he continued writing a lot and managed to publish his first book Tamerlane already in 1827, admittedly under the pseudonym of “A Bostonian”. The same year he entered the army because of his indigence, but left two years later to become a cadet at the US military academy at West Point, where his fellow cadets supported him financially to publish his third book Poems by Edgar A. Poe. At that time he had already found his own style of poetry with so-called “musical effects”, which he became so famous for. Poe then decided to do writing for a living, and he moved to Baltimore with his aunt and his cousin Virginia. A few of his short stories were published, and he won a $50 prize for his short story MS. Found in a bottle. In 1835 Edgar and 13-year-old Virginia celebrated their marriage. But in spite of his success as a critic and editor, he was a kind of a rebel, who criticized famous contemporary authors. This made it hard for him to be accepted at “The Southern Literary Messenger”, which he wrote for at that time, and was dismissed also due to his drinking problems. He also tried his luck in New York and Philadelphia, but couldn’t quite gain ground anywhere. Two years after his wife had died, Poe was also overcome by death on the 7th of October 1849. He did not leave a quantity of works, but they all are of high quality. Some of his most famous short stories are The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-Tale Heart or Berenice and to list a few poems: Tamerlane, Al Aaraaf, and of course The Raven. Almost all his works are of higher value in respect of both form and content. The tone largely agrees with them and they show a great general knowledge. Fo...