Examples Of Insanity In The Tell Tale Heart

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The Insanity of Genius
We are all a little mad. In our own individual ways, we are all a little mad. We all cope with our madness in different ways. There are those among us who choose to cope with their disease by delving deep into the darkness of the human psyche, returning to pen stories of horror so real, so acuminate, so macabre as to draw readers in to sharing the author’s personal madness’s. Edgar Allan Poe was just such a man. Like moths to a flame, Poe’s readers eagerly travel to brutal and horrifying destinations in the mind of the author, all the while gleefully anticipating and yet dreading each new word. Most, if not all of Poe’s more famous works, and specifically “ The Tell-Tale Heart”, illuminate his own obsession with his struggle for sanity; his …show more content…
His father and mother were both actors in a time when acting was considered a less-than-admirable profession. David Poe, Edgar’s father, deserted the family while Poe was still a toddler, and his mother, Eliza Poe, died of tuberculosis before Edgar’s third birthday. However, Poe was taken in by a very wealthy tobacco exporter by the name of John Allan of Richmond, Virginia, and given an excellent education. As a teenager, Poe became “moody” and withdrawn which detrimentally affected his relationship with John Allan.(Kennedy, Gioia, and Revoyr 38) In college, by all accounts, Poe was an excellent student and an accomplished athlete; Poe “still holds the record for swimming against the current in the James River at six miles”(Semtner, par. 1). Unfortunately, Edgar Allan Poe, as his many biographers state, was prone to many self-destructive tendencies, and his abuse of alcohol and gambling forced him to leave college and join the army, where at the age of eighteen, he published his first work of fiction. In his remaining twenty-two years of life, Poe became one of, if not the most, celebrated American author of his
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