Edgar Allan Poe

Drawing the Line between Self-Destructive Life Style and Actual Suicide

Bibliographic Data

ID13629751
AuthorsErnest Shulman (New York, corresponding author)
Year1997
Volume34
Issue1
Pages29-69
Publication date1997-02-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueOMEGA - Journal of Death and Dying (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0030-2228 • E-ISSN: 1541-3764
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2190/3c77-7240-wndc-bbke
OpenAlexW2090628462
LanguageEN
References cited23

Edgar Allan Poe, an alcoholic from age seventeen onward, died at age forty. Besides his alcoholism, he was self-destructive in various other ways. He was constantly in debt, lived often in abject poverty, could not hold a job, feuded with the literary establishment and most other writers, lied and plagiarized, and usually changed residences at least once a year. Nevertheless, his ability to win the love and devotion of many women, especially his wife and mother-in-law, provided the basis of his great achievements as writer, magazine editor, and literary critic, and his total commitment to American literature. Poe's history of bereavement, beginning with his mother's death when he was three, and his longing to join loved ones in the next world, help to support an interpretation of his death as neither disguised suicide nor an accident, but as death with a suicidal element

Art · Duty · Interpretation (philosophy · Literature · Political science · Poverty · Psychoanalysis · Style (visual arts · Wife · Crime and Detective Fiction Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Traumatic Brain Injury Research

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub