History Creator / EdgarAllanPoe

* AuthorVocabularyCalendar: In particular, the word "arabesque."

* ''Literature/TheGoldBug''

[[http://www.eapoe.org/works/essays/philcomp.htm Poe believed that all stories should be short enough to be read in one sitting.]] He also believed that the perfect subject for poetry is the death of a beautiful young woman[[note]]To be precise, he thought it perfect because it married the "most poetical subject"-- Beauty-- with the "most poetical emotion"-- Melancholy.[[/note]] (which should tell you volumes about [[CreatorBreakdown his own love life]], not to mention the death of his mother and his adoptive mother at a young age). After the death of his parents, he was taken in by a foster family and spent some of his childhood abroad, spending a couple of years in a boarding school in England before returning to America at the age of 11. After squandering his college tuition money gambling, he enlisted in the US Army at the age of 18. He published his first work, ''Tamerlane and Other Poems'', while serving as an artilleryman at Fort Independence, Boston, Massachusetts. After securing an early discharge, he was accepted to the Military Academy at West Point, but gave up on it after a falling-out with his adoptive father, though he was popular enough that his fellow cadets chipped in enough money to help him publish another book of his poetry. Moving to New York, he became a full-time writer, and struggled financially for the rest of his short life until his death in Baltimore, Maryland at age 40.

* "Literature/TheGoldBug"

* "Literature/TheSpectacles"

* ''Literature/TheGoldBug''

* ''Literature/{{Ligeia}}''

* ''Literature/{{Metzengerstein}}''
* ''Literature/{{Morella}}''

* ''Literature/TheSpectacles''

-->-- '''[[Creator/ArthurConanDoyle Sir Arthur Conan Doyle]]''', speech at the Authors' Club in London (March 1, 1909)

* BewareTheNiceOnes: Long-suffering dwarf Hop-Frog [[TheDogBitesBack finally snaps]] when the king dares to strike his beloved. His subsequent revenge is not pretty.

* BreakTheCutie: Trippetta in "Hop-Frog."

* CourtJester: The main character of "Hop-Frog" is a court jester who was abducted and forced into his position. He ultimately gets his revenge on the king and his court.

* DepravedDwarf: Subverted in "Hop-Frog". The king and his courtiers who torment Hop-Frog and his beloved Trippetta are the depraved ones, while the latter two are pretty nice and decent people.

* TheDogBitesBack: In "Hop-Frog", the eponymous jester repays the abuse heaped upon himself and Trippetta by tricking the king and his advisors into letting him turn them into a chandelier. [[KillItWithFire And then lighting it.]]

* FatBastard: The obese king and his ministers in "Hop-Frog."

* HandicappedBadass: Hop-Frog may be a dwarf with deformed legs, but that doesn't stop him from getting his revenge.

* LoveHurts: Let's put it this way - if the character loves a woman, [[SortingAlgorithmOfMortality she's on death row]].
** This was probably inspired by the fact that basically every woman he ever loved in any way (his mother, foster mother, girlfriends, and his wife) all died young, mostly from tuberculosis.
*** Averted in "Hop-Frog" when Hop-Frog and his beloved Trippetta escape to their own country at the end of the story.

* MonsterClown: Hop-Frog was the king's court jester until he had it with the poor treatment he and his friend Trippetta had been receiving and dresses eight people as orangutans for an upcoming MasqueradeBall and lit them [[ManOnFire on fire]] as an "act", all for {{Revenge}}.

* WouldHitAGirl: The king in "Hop-Frog" throws a glass of wine at the dancer Trippetta because she asked him to stop tormenting Hop-Frog. He and the courtiers who laughed pay for their cruelty when Hop-Frog turns them into a human chandelier.

* BloodFromEveryOrifice: In "The Masque of the Red Death," the Red Death is a mysterious infection or its personification, whose symptoms include profuse bleeding all over the face and the body, which kills within half an hour.

* DownerEnding: Almost every time, but "The Masque of the Red Death" is a standout example:
--> ''And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.''

* ThePlague: In "Masque of the Red Death."

* TickTockTerror: ''The Masque of the Red Death'' mixes this trope with For Doom the Bell Tolls. In the seventh, pitch black party room lit with crimson lighting, which is actively feared by the guests, looms an ominous black clock. Its bong is so peculiar and intimidating that each time it chimes, the orchestra stops playing and the partygoers stop dancing. When the clock strikes midnight, the Red Death arrives and kills off everyone, and the clock stops ticking when the very last person alive dies, as if it was inextricably linked to the tragedy.

* YourCostumeNeedsWork: "The Masque of the Red Death". The guests at the MasqueradeBall are all shocked by the tastelessness one fellow displays by dressing as the incarnation of [[ThePlague the Red Death]]. Then someone rips his mask off and finds there's [[NoFaceUnderTheMask nothing underneath]]...

* KissingCousins: Subverted, as Berenice doesn't reciprocate her cousin's feelings (if she's aware of them).

* TheToothHurts: "Berenice" is about a young man with a tendency to go into trance states where he can't remember his actions afterward and a growing obsession with the teeth of his cousin/fiancée Berenice. Eventually he wakes up from one such state, surrounded by bloody dental implements and holding a box full of Berenice's teeth.

His works were the inspiration for the first album from Music/TheAlanParsonsProject and for a series of PC mystery games called the ''VideoGame/DarkTales''. His work is also one of the inspirations for the ''VideoGame/MountAndBlade'' GameMod ''Videogame/SolidAndShade''.

His only novel was ''Literature/TheNarrativeOfArthurGordonPymOfNantucket''. That he had written a novel while preferring short stories could be explained seeing the {{Troll}} entry.

Poe was a Baltimorean, and "Literature/TheRaven" is the namesake of the Baltimore Ravens.

* MonsterClown: Hop-Frog was the king's court jester until he had it with the poor treatment he and his friend Trippetta had been receiving and dresses eight people as orangutans for an upcoming MasqueradeBall and lit them [[ManOnFire on]] [[KillItWithFire fire]] as an "act", all for {{Revenge}}.

* CurbStompBattle: Averted in most of his stories but a common feature of his book reviews. Poe was an acute critic who passed the essential test of perceiving who of his own contemporaries were talented: he was very positive about Creator/NathanielHawthorne and Creator/CharlesDickens and cautiously approving about Longfellow, but less gifted writers he gleefully beat into a fine paste. Choice examples are his reviews of Theodore S. Fay's ''Norman Leslie'', George Jones's ''Ancient America'', and the most famous of all, the so-called Drake-Halleck Review, a brutal takedown of Joseph Rodman Drake's ''The Culprit Fay and other Poems'' and Fitz Greene Halleck's ''Alnwick Castle, with other Poems''.

* SpringtimeForHitler: A certain Rufus Wilmot Griswold had a thorn in the side of Poe. After Poe's death, Griswold tried hard to ruin Poe's reputation. Most famously, he wrote a subversive biography where Poe was depicted as arrogant, evil, constantly drunk or high and very mentally unstable. Unfortunately for Griswold, this didn't deter people from enjoying Poe, instead spawned interest in the author and made him a legend surrounded by myths. [[EvilIsCool Who wouldn't want to read a story written by a man who was described as being "evil"]]?[[note]]Griswold's dislike of Poe may have been caused by a review Poe wrote of Griswold's book ''The Poets and Poetry of America: with a Historical Introduction'', which although very positive ("Mr. Griswold [...] has entitled himself to the thanks of his countrymen, while showing himself a man of taste, talent, ''and tact''") didn't actually call it the greatest book of its kind ever written. Griswold is only remembered today as being the guy who tried to deter people from reading Poe.[[/note]]

* AwesomeMcCoolname: Signora Psyche Zenobia. Only her enemies, she proclaims, ever refer to her as Suky Snobbs.