For the next two years, he worked as an assistant editor for the Southern Literary Messenger while publishing fiction and book reviews. In 1835, Poe secretly married his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm. Aware that he would never inherit much from his prosperous foster father, Poe embarked on a literary career at the age of twenty-one. While Allan funded Poe’s education at a private school in England for five years, he failed to support him when he attended the University of Virginia and the United States Military Academy at West Point. Unlike the narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” who claims that he had no desires for the old man’s gold, Poe was dependent on Allan for financial support. Allan never legally adopted Poe, and their relationship became a stormy one after Poe reached his teenage years. Both his parents died before Poe turned three years old, and he was raised by John Allan, a rich businessman, in Richmond, Virginia. His father, David Poe, was a lawyer-turned-actor, and his mother, Elizabeth Arnold, was an English actress. Author BiographyĮdgar Allan Poe was born into a theatrical family on January 19, 1809. Poe’s work has influenced genres as diverse as French symbolist poetry and Hollywood horror films, and writers as diverse as Ambrose Bierce and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. “The Tell-Tale Heart” exemplifies Poe’s ability to expose the dark side of humankind and is a harbinger of novels and films dealing with psychological realism.

Poe believed that all good literature must create a unity of effect on the readerĪnd this effect must reveal truth or evoke emotions. It is admired as an excellent example of how a short story can produce an effect on the reader. “The Tell-Tale Heart” is simultaneously a horror story and psychological thriller told from a first-person perspective.

Poe is now considered a forefather of two literary genres, detective stories and science fiction, and is regarded as an important writer of psychological thrillers and horror. Other critics, like George Woodberry in his 1885 study of Poe, considered “The Tell-Tale Heart” merely a “tale of conscience.” But this simplistic view has changed over the years as more complex views of Poe and his works have emerged. While “The Tell-Tale Heart” and his other short stories were not critically acclaimed during his lifetime, Poe earned respect among his peers as a competent writer, insightful literary critic, and gifted poet, particularly after the publication of his famous poem, “The Raven,” in 1845.Īfter Poe’s death in 1849, some critics faulted his obsession with dark and depraved themes. The story is a psychological portrait of a mad narrator who kills a man and afterward hears his victim’s relentless heartbeat. One of Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous short stories, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” was first published in the January, 1843 edition of James Russell Lowell’s The Pioneer and was reprinted in the Augissue of The Broadway Journal.

The tell tale heart story