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The origin of the macabre

fears and terror that Edgar Allan Poe , a pioneer of science fiction and detective fiction, delighted in his stories were inspired by himself. In its ongoing debate between madness and lucidity posterity could take form of whatever he wrote. The difficult years of her childhood, her stormy dawn of life, made him a creature frail and vulnerable, hypersensitive to capture the sinister and dark around the man and knocked over the role. He said of himself: " Many times I thought I could plainly hear the sound of darkness creeping over the horizon ."

Poe was born in Boston, USA, January 19, 1809. Son of a pair of traveling players, his father, David Poe, tuberculosis and alcoholic, died shortly after birth, leaving his mother Elizabeth, consumptive also in charge of three young children. Immersed in total poverty, left with a theater company to South America. On December 26, 1811 his mother died and left his children orphans and destitute. That day he met Poe's partner chased him forever: death. According to the writer I. Sanguinetti G, is at that precise moment when "his mother start a gallery of women languishing and dying and love will find throughout your life and somehow influence the creation of their young heroines: beautiful, delicate and hopelessly doomed. "

Poe was adopted by a wealthy merchant and planter from Virginia, John Allan, who allowed his great education. In 1815, he traveled with his new family to England, where images of neighborhoods hidden and mysterious, full of mist and old houses, struck on the head of the sensitive child and marked his early taste for the macabre. In February , 1826, he joined the University of Virginia, at the Faculty of Modern and Classical Languages. It was at that time was served alcohol hopelessly and drugs (opium and laudanum). Repeatedly stated that he drank to escape reality, to escape memories that tortured him, " of loneliness, the fear of impending doom " but also did so when everything was stable. No wonder he was a victim of alcohol, as his father and grandfather also were. Its debts for the game, his alcoholism and rebellious behavior led to John Allan refused to keep it there. On 24 March 1827, Poe decided to leave her adoptive family and embarked on a life erratic lonely and miserable.

Its existence was spent by cities like New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, where he worked at small newspapers to survive and increasingly dominated him over the drink. Peter Ackroyd, author of the biography Poe, wrote: " His marriage in 1835 with his cousin, Virginia Clemm, we provided certain stability, and although the bride was only 13 at the time of linking, lived in harmony for a decade, always pursued by economic hardship. Poe was publishing poems, stories and book reviews that earned him some notoriety, but his balance fell apart when Virginia became ill with tuberculosis . "

After Virginia's death, Poe was given to individual women, as well as delirium and alcohol, which came to haunt him. On October 3, 1849 was found in an alley in Baltimore, a few meters from a pub, drunk, half-conscious, talking loudly to imaginary beings. He died on 7 October. His last words were: " What God help my poor soul." Nobody went to his funeral. His death went completely unnoticed. Nobody knew that drunk's death meant the loss of one of the brightest minds in the literature of all time.