A Cold, Brittle Wind Blew The Front Door Open

The author gives a description of short story writer, poet and critic Edgar Allan Poe's place in the history of the U.S. is presented. As literary editor of "Graham's Lady's" and "Gentleman's Magazine," Poe became a major figure in American letters. Although his heavy drinking cost him his job, Poe continued to write in a cool style that was the polar opposite of his romantic poems and horror stories. Thomas Fleming gives details for his main idea that Poe’s works are widely known due to his technique of writing. Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Black Cat” is perfect examples of his suspenseful writing technique that grabs his audience, holds on to readers throughout the entire story and leaves the audience on the edge of their seats. Edgar Allan Poe’s stories are always thought of as being suspenseful and extremely dramatic. To achieve the suspense in Edgar Allen Poe’s, he uses gothic imagery to help add an unknown, eerie effect. The author, Thomas Fleming, gives an example with “…with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable

makes the reader aware of Poe's prominent tone of melancholy. A strong device for the

The dark and eerie tone of the murder story and its unusual setting contribute to the story’s theme of defense of one’s honor and avenging wrongdoing. The haughtiness and conceited attitudes of the two men create an extension of this theme in which Poe wants to show how far some men will go when they receive a blow to the ego. The story’s setting in the

“He would have preferred Rabelais’s “Gargantua,” to the “Zadig” of Voltaire: and, upon the whole, practical jokes suited his taste far better than verbal ones.”

The main themes of Edgar Allan Poe’s works are death, perversity, revenge and destruction. The settings he employed in the given short stories, especially in The Fall of the House of Usher and The Black Cat are Gothic. Therefore, naturally the mood of these stories would be dark and sepulchral. However, this is not a trivial employment undertaken to put the reader in a certain kind of zone.

Many believed that Edgar Allen Poe was insane, while others thought he was just a troubled man. After reading through his letters to his “Pa”, it was evident to me that he was depressed, desperate, and hopeless yet hopeful. I did not sense that he was insane or mentally ill while reading his works. Instead I could tell that his life was not very easy and that he was faced with many challenges and hardship.

In Avi’s novel, The Man Who Was Poe, the reader learns all about the story’s focal antagonist, Edgar Allan Poe, under the alias of Dupin. Poe was a real man, who is one of the best-known American authors, with one of the most distinctive styles of writing. He is mostly recognized for is short stories that possess a gruesome plot and a hair-raising theme. In the novel, the style of Avi’s writing can easily be identified as an emulated version of the way Poe wrote. The way Avi used his writing to make the reader feel is also very similar to Poe. Both authors used descriptions and selective vocabulary in attempt to set the mood of the story and make the audience, who reads the story, feel a certain way. The elements of fiction play a big role in the style of the authors’ writing. The strategy, of usage, of setting, character, theme, plot, and mood, in Poe’s stories, and Avi’s novel, correspond to one another in many ways. Descriptions of Poe and the way he is depicted in the story also duplicated many of Poe’s real life characteristics. Poe’s style of writing is clearly a substantial influence on Avi, and is projected throughout the duration of his book with the usage of theme, setting and mood, along with the physical and mental characteristics of Poe himself.

Edgar Allan Poe has a distinctive and dark way of writing (Poe & Kennedy, pp.22). His mysterious style of writing appeals to passion and sentimentality. Poe’s most prominent works of fiction are gothic. His stories tend to have similar recurring theme of either death, lost love or both. Poe’s psychologically thrilling stories examining the depths of the humanoid psyche earned him much fame throughout his lifetime and after his death. And this distinctive style of writing made him possess his own style of wiring (Arbor, pp.71). There is a psychological concentration which is an important characteristic of Poe’s literatures, particularly the tales of horror that encompass his best and well-known works, such as The Black Cat and The Raven which

This essay will discuss the themes in Poe’s writing that mirror his personal life and, in addition, the fear and supernatural motivators for his characters. First, I will discuss Poe’s background and explore how he became best known as a poet for his tales of mystery and macabre.

Although now seen as the father of the modern horror story, Edgar Allan Poe was previously viewed as a drunken failure. Within Poe’s writings much of his own life riddled with guilt, anxiety, alcohol, depression and death shines through resulting in works that appear unrelated yet once dissected prove similar. This is true for Poe’s works “The Raven” and “The Black Cat”. Poe’s examples of gothic fiction share the use of the color black and a rapid digression of the narrator 's sanity while seemingly unveiling Poe’s internal pain. Despite these similarities, Poe’s works also differ immensely. “The Black Cat” focuses around death while “The Raven” is fixed around discovering the reasoning for a bird 's arrival. Moreover, gothic themes seen within “The Raven” do not necessarily remain constant when compared to “The Black Cat”.

Parallels in Poe's House of Usher and Bierce's Beyond the Wall, Poe’s The Black Cat and Bierce's John Mortonson's Funeral, and in M.S. Found in a Bottle by Poe and Three and One are One by Bierce.

The setting presented in this story has a very dark and gloomy atmosphere which has been used as a technique to help outline the scene. It is set in the one location; a bedroom. Poe describes the room as being “black as pitch with the thick darkness,” which deepens the effect of terror. The night setting gives the text an eerie feel as it focuses on the horrors of night time. This horror creates a noticeable impact which is recognisable when the victim cried out “who’s there?” against the backdrop of frighteningly still silence. Ultimately, the way in which Poe’s story is set builds anxiety and fear in the reader.

Among Poe’s work, I will typically illustrate these three works “The Black Cat”, “A Tell Tales Heart” , “The Fall of the House of Usher” , and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” to dedicate the use of symbolism. Other works will be briefly mentioned.

He himself had declared it to be a ‘romantic’ genre along with gothic interests and it being a carrier of Puritan History of England. For the obvious reasons this novel deals with issues concerning the times of mid-1850 wherein Hawthorne has juxtaposed “poverty and riches”, “aristocracy and democracy”, “youth with age”, “greed with unselfishness”, “complex with simple”, “appearance with reality”, “pride with humbleness”, “the isolated with un-isolated” (Dillingham, 59) all these parallels are supported by detailed characterizations of almost all main characters in the text. Hawthorne has provisioned and facilitated his characters with an independent backbone with which they support his themes and carry them on their own shoulders. The text in its romantic narrative fashion has been well-crafted to involve various themes which Nathaniel Hawthorne wished to include in this 1851 published Gothic work. It will not be incorrect to put forth the view that Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables is a representative of the era and society of that time. He has accurately projected the concerned subjects of that time and how they used to affect the humans of that period. The juxtapositions too are echoes of the society and mirror the basics of whatever contrived into being the fundamentals of that society. Therefore, the themes of this text are majorly colored by the real world of that period and the

Edgar Allan Poe was a fictional writer that astonished readers with his many mysterious poems and his tales of horror such as “The Raven”, “Annabelle Lee”, and “The Fall of the house of Usher”.