Edgar Allan Poe: Drawing the Line between Self-Destructive Life Style and Actual Suicide

Abstract

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.