Author Expose

The life of Edgar Allan Poe, as the lives of many other authors, was filled with tragedies that all influenced his writings. From the very beginning of his writing career, he loved writing poems for the loves of his life. Later, when he reached adulthood and realized the harsh realities of life, his writing became darker and more disturbing, perhaps due to his excessive alcohol intake. His horror stories remain some of the scariest stories ever written, and, because of this, some have speculated on what caused these themes to come so naturally to him. Many historians and literature fanatics have suspected his unstable love life as the source while others have attributed it to his substance abuse. The cause of his unique writing is most likely a combination of both of these theories; but the primary factor is the death of so many of his loved ones and the abuse which some of them inflicted upon him. This, understandably, darkened his outlook significantly. Poe was born on January 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts. Edgar, his older brother,
Henry, and his younger sister, Rosalie’s childhood was no fairy tale. Their father, David Poe, deserts the family, leaving Poe’s mother, Elizabeth Poe, with their three children. Making matters worse, Elizabeth Poe soon falls ill with tuberculosis and eventually dies on October
8, 1811. Within days, their father, too, dies of tuberculosis. With no parents to take care of them, the three children are split up. Henry goes to live with his paternal grandparents. A
Richmond couple, John and Frances Allan, takes in Edgar as a foster child. Rosalie is taken by another Richmond family named Mackenzie. Both Edgar and Rosalie adopt their foster families’ names as their middle names. Edgar’s foster father, John Allan, was always abusive toward him, and was often under the influence of alcohol during the fights and some physical abuse endued.
They fought constantly and Edgar finally, at age 18, enlisted