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Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston in the family of actors. He lost his parents at a very early age & was adopted by the wife of a rich merchant Allan (this name became the second name of Edgar). That woman really loved llie boy & tried to support him all the life. But her husband could not stand him us (the future writer did not fulfill his expectations and did not become a tradesman. Allan was very talenled in maths, drawing, literature & other fields, but he was rather impetuous that prevented him from taking up any serious & constant job. In the end he was sent to the Military Academy by his foster father but the strict discipline at the Academy was alien to him & he did his best to be dismissed (expelled). As a result his foster father disinherited him.
Poe's life was full of deprivation & poverty. In 1836 he marries his cousin Virginia Clemm (she was about 14). She was one of the very few supporters of Poe's in his life. And we see the traces of his love to her in many of his works. But in 1847 she died. It was a real shock to Poe. And he never managed to overcome the depression & despair afterwards. This slate of mind, and his alcoholism & drug taking caused his early death. Poe's dramatic life experience endowed his literary work (especially poetry) with tragic tone. His romantic aesthetics was very peculiar. It lacks lrving's humour & optimism; it hardly ever draws any vast epic pictures like Cooper's works do. His works are permeated with mystery, fantasy & exotics.
Like other romanticists he put feeling & intuition above reason & rationalism. Yet on the other hand he sings prays to man's intellectual powers, observation, analysis & man's thirst for knowledge. He also manifests his deep knowledge of human psychology & great ability to depict it in his works. His literary canon (list of works) includes 64 short stories, 2 long stories (novellas), about 50 poems.
He is the pioneer of the intellectual detective story. And the protagonist of his detective stories August Dupin can be looked on as the first one in the gallery of omniscient criminologists: "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841);'The Mystery of Marie R oget”1842-1843);"The Purloined Letter" (1844), etc.
Edgar Allan Poe was also the inventor of the science fiction genre:"A Descent into the Maelstrom"(1841)
Besides the detective stories & science fiction stories E. A. Poe created a number of horror (Gothic) stories:
“Ligeia” (1838); "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1 839); "The Masque of the Red Death" (1842); "The Pit and Pendulum" (1842), etc.
He worked out his own aesthetics of story writing: stories should have a dynamic & entertaining plot that would keep the reader in suspense to the very end. Yet they should be short enough to be read at one sitting. He called it "a single effect". His poems are also written according to this principle. They are also permeated with mysticism & horror which however (like in his stories) are at the end explained by some logical reasons.
Poe's best known poems are: "Annabel Lee” (1849);"The Bells" (1849); "The Raven" (1845).
They are full of mysticism, especially "The Raven", which is a symbolic poem dealing with problems of love, life & death. The meaning of the title has several connotations. The raven symbolizes omen & wisdom. Like in Poe's stories mysticism tends to logical explanation.
Poe's contemporaries failed to appreciate him but he influenced both American & European writers (Poe's combination of decadence & romantic primitivism appealed enormously to Europeans, particularly to the French poets Stephane Mallarme, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Valery, and Arthur Rimbaud.).
Nathaniel Hawthorne- was a descendant of a Puritan family. He lived in Massachusetts. One of his ancestors was a judge who took part in the notorious "witch-hunting" Trial. And one of his novels - "The House of the Seven Gables" (1851) tells of a curse which a judge's family had to carry throughout many centuries.
His greatest work is "The Scarlet Letter" (1850) which is based on real events of the 17 century. It deals with problems of crime & repentance, confession, sexual & spiritual repression. The author showed how the puritanical fanatism ruined the life of noble & decent people.
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