We’re unsure whether anything supernatural occurs or if we can believe anything the narrator says. As usual with Poe, the ambiguity makes it even creepier.
He escalates from animal abuse to murder and is literally and figuratively haunted by his actions. Often paired with “The Tell-Tale Heart,” this story features another unnamed, unreliable, and violent narrator. His theory and fiction helped define the short story as a form. Unlike many other 19 th century writers, Poe thought that fiction should never be didactic or moralizing. Known mainly as a literary critic in his lifetime, Poe worked for several literary journals. Poe helped create the overlapping moods and genres of horror, mystery, historical fiction, slipstream, and science fiction and fantasy as we know them today. Before the formal field of psychology existed, Poe’s stories explored guilt, paranoia, delusions, and obsessions. They contain wordplay and symbolism but also anticipate more realistic writers like Fyodor Dostoevsky. Poe’s stories convey in a few pages what some writers take hundreds of pages to tell. He died in Baltimore in 1849 at age 40 from causes that are still unclear. Born Edgar Poe in Boston in 1809, after his father left his family and his mother died, he was raised mainly in Richmond, Virginia, by the Allan family. writers to support himself through his writing.
Edgar Allan Poe was one of the all-time most inventive and versatile authors in American literature.