Edgar Allan Poe's sad and harsh life has contributed to the morbid and haunting tone in all of his creative works. Critics and experts agree that the theme of death reveals itself time and time again throughout his short stories and poems. .
The facts of Edgar Allan Poe's life are hard and seem to be one disaster after another. He was born in Boston on January 19, 1809 to David and Elizabeth Arnold Poe. Poe obviously got his creative talents from his parents who happened to be actors. When Edgar was an infant, his father abandoned the family and left never to return. If that weren't enough to stain his childhood, at age three he watched his mother die coughing up blood from tuberculosis after a performance. After he was orphaned, he was taken in and raised by John and Frances Allan. He was very close to Frances. John was a wealthy merchant.
When Poe first started writing poems, his foster parents had considered publishing it but decided against "flattering the boy's vanity- (Bloom 11). Later on in his life when he was trying to pursue his career in writing, he constantly was in bad terms with John Allan because he refused to support him financially. The relationship with John Allan, who never officially adopted him, grew even more distraught when Frances Allan died. Eventually, John Allan remarried and cut off all relations with Poe. .
In 1836, at age 27, Poe married his younger cousin, Virginia, who was only a mere 13 years old. This gave Poe an "idealized love object and domestic stability- ( Bloom 12). When Virginia was singing, she ruptured a blood vessel and never really recovered. That blood vessel brought her to her doom. Virginia's death was a major inspiration in a lot of Poe's short stories. He wrote some of his finest work in this time period. He soon lunged into a deep depression and turned to alcohol and drugs for comfort. Things didn't get better when he was rejected by Sarah Helen Whitman.
