The Cask of Amontillado

“The Cask of Amontillado” (1846)

“For the love of God, Montresor!”

Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809, and died on October 7, 1849. In his stormy forty years, which included a marriage to his cousin, fights with other writers, and legendary drinking binges, Poe lived in all the important literary centers of the northeastern United States: Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston. He was a magazine editor, a poet, a short story writer, a critic, and a lecturer. He introduced the British horror story, or the Gothic genre, to American literature, along with the detective story, science fiction, and literary criticism. Poe became a key figure in the nineteenth-century flourishing of American letters and literature. Famed twentieth-century literary critic F.O. Matthiessen named this period the American Renaissance. He argued that nineteenth-century American writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman crafted a distinctly American literature that attempts to escape from the long shadow of the British literary tradition. Matthiessen paid little attention to Edgar Allan Poe. Although he long had a reputation in Europe as one of America’s most original writers, only in the latter half of the twentieth century has Poe been viewed as a crucial contributor to the American Renaissance.

The often tragic circumstances of Poe’s life haunt his writings. His father disappeared not

long after the child’s birth, and, at the age of three, Poe watched his mother die of tuberculosis. Poe then went to live with John and Frances Allan, wealthy theatergoers who knew his parents, both actors, from the Richmond, Virginia, stage. Like Poe’s mother, Frances Allan was chronically ill, and Poe experienced her sickness much as he did his mother’s. His relationship with John Allan, who was loving but moody, generous but demanding, was emotionally turbulent. With Allan’s financial help, Poe attended school in England and then enrolled at the University of Virginia in 1826, but he was forced to leave after two semesters. Although Poe blamed Allan’s stinginess, his own gambling debts played a large role in his fiscal woes. A tendency to cast blame on others, without admitting his own faults, characterized Poe’s relationship with many people, most significantly Allan. Poe struggled with a view of Allan as a false father, generous enough to take him in at age three, but never dedicated enough to adopt him as a true son. There are echoes of Poe’s upbringing in his works, as sick mothers and guilty fathers appear in many of his tales.

Edgar Allan Poe Small Bio

After leaving the University of Virginia, Poe spent some time in the military before he used his contacts in Richmond and Baltimore to enter the magazine industry. With a little experience, Poe relied on his characteristic bravado to convince Thomas Willis White, then head of the fledgling Southern Literary Messenger, to take him on as an editor in 1835. This position gave him a forum for his early tales, including “Berenice” and “Morella.” The Messenger also established Poe as a leading and controversial literary critic, who often attacked his New England counterparts—especially poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—in the genteel pages of the magazine. Poe ultimately fell out of favor with White, but his literary criticism made him a popular speaker on the lecture circuit. Poe never realized his most ambitious dream—the launch of his own magazine, the Stylus. Until his death, he believed that the New England literary establishment had stolen his glory and had prevented the Stylus from being published.

His name has since become synonymous with macabre tales like “The Tell-Tale Heart,” but Poe assumed a variety of literary personas during his career. The Messenger—as well as Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and Graham’s—established Poe as one of America’s first popular literary critics. He advanced his theories in popular essays, including “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846), “The Rationale of Verse” (1848), and “The Poetic Principle.” In “The Philosophy of Composition” Poe explained how he had crafted “The Raven,” the 1845 poem that made him nationally famous. In the pages of these magazines, Poe also introduced a new form of short fiction—the detective story—in tales featuring the Parisian crime solver C. Auguste Dupin. The detective story follows naturally from Poe’s interest in puzzles, word games, and secret codes, which he loved to present and decode in the pages of the Messenger to dazzle his readers. The word “detective” did not exist in English at the time that Poe was writing, but the genre has become a fundamental mode of twentieth-century literature and film. Dupin and his techniques of psychological inquiry have informed countless sleuths, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe.

Gothic literature, a genre that rose with Romanticism in Britain in the late eighteenth century,

explores the dark side of human experience—death, alienation, nightmares, ghosts, and haunted landscapes. Poe brought the Gothic to America. American Gothic literature dramatizes a culture plagued by poverty and slavery through characters afflicted with various forms of insanity and melancholy. Poe, America’s foremost southern writer before William Faulkner, generated a Gothic ethos from his own experiences in Virginia and other slaveholding territories, and the black and white imagery in his stories reflects a growing national anxiety over the issue of slavery.

In the spectrum of American literature, the Gothic remains in the shadow of the dominant genre of the American Renaissance—the Romance. Popularized by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Romantic literature, like Gothic literature, relies on haunting and mysterious narratives that blur the boundary between the real and the fantastic. Poe’s embrace of the Gothic with its graphic violence and disturbing scenarios places him outside the ultimately conservative and traditional resolutions of Romantic novels such as Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851).

In Romances like the novels of Hawthorne, conflicts occur among characters within the context of society and are resolved in accordance with society’s rules. Poe’s Gothic tales are brief flashes of chaos that flare up within lonely narrators living at the fringes of society. Poe’s longest work, the 1838 novel Arthur Gordon Pym, described in diary form a series of episodes on a journey to Antarctica. A series of bizarre incidents and exotic discoveries at sea, Pym lacks the cohesive elements of plot or quest that tie together most novels and epics and is widely considered an artistic failure. Poe’s style and concerns never found their best expression in longer forms, but his short stories are considered masterpieces worldwide. The Poe’s Gothic is a potent brew, best served in small doses.

Cool Story about Edgar Allan Poe

I want to share some facts about Poe’s life…

1. His parents passed away when he was only a child.

2. At eleven, the Allan family fostered him and he went to live in Virginia.

3. He introduces the first ever literary detective genre.

4. He got married at 27 and his wife was 13 and was his cousin.

5. He became an alcoholic after his wife’s death.

6. Only 7 people attended his funeral in1849.

7. 160 years after his death, he was given a proper ceremony at Baltimore marking the bicentennial of Poe’s birth.

8. An NFL Team is named after Poe’s immortal poem “The Baltimore Ravens” in honor to his Bestseller “The Raven”.

9. He is called by many as “The Father Of The Detective Story”.

10. His death is a mystery, he was going from Virginia to New York and a week later he was found dead in a Baltimore street completely drunk, wearing clothes that don't belong to him, he was taken to the hospital and 2 days after, he passes away.

Top Ten Facts of Edgar Allan Poe

In Italy, the ambitious projects of urban renewal, development, and expansion initiated in Rome in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries reach a spectacular apex during this period. An affluent and powerful papacy sponsors many of these projects with the aim of fashioning the city into a world capital of great beauty, a hub of learning and the arts, and, above all, a symbol of Catholic glory.

Artists from elsewhere in Europe, particularly the North, visit Rome to study the masterpieces of antiquity and the Renaissance and to execute commissions for the popes and a wealthy secular clientele. It is here that the Baroque style takes form, shaped especially by the hands of several great masters: Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Francesco Borromini, and Pietro da Cortona. Monuments of the Baroque join architecture, painting, and sculpture into a unified whole of extraordinary grandeur.

Possession of territories in Southern Italy is, as the last period, widely contested by various

foreign powers. Many artists from the Iberian Peninsula ate drawn to this region, particularly to Naples, a city under Spanish rule. A school of painting flourishes there, profoundly influenced by Caravaggio. Notable examples of Baroque architecture occur throughout Southern Italy, particularly in the Sicilian cities of Noto, Ragusa, and Modica, rebuilt after a devastating earthquake in 1693. Southern Italy is also an important center of porcelain production.

I think the story is going to be about wines, maybe the story of them, and the different classes of it, how to harvest and how to preserve it, maybe knowing the whole Amontillado wine world, maybe a romantic story at the same time, around the wine theme.

It is difficult for me to make a connection between the literary work and the historical background because all the story was underground and Italy at that time was a country that was very important in different ways as the architecture, the arts, and etcetera.

This short story was written in the Literary Movements Gothic Fiction (1764-1820), and Romanticism (1798-1832). It took place in Italy. Even do, Edgar Allan Poe was a pure Gothic writer.

The story has nothing to do with what I think is going to be about...is a little bit creepy, I

really don't like it so much, I mean, I didn't enjoy it, is not my reading style. It is about revenge, torture, murder is like a dark story, it occurs in the Italian catacombs... Then, after fifty years, the murderer confesses his crime. Reading about the way that Edgar Allan Poe wrote, I found a comment that says: "Edgar Allan Poe stories are fun because they're complicated puzzles, you have to exercise your brain muscles to figure them out".

This story let me thinking about the revenge thing or the anger and resentment can do, these feelings really rot your heart, it turns the human being really mean and it causes the death, by killing. Maybe Montresor thinks that dying is the only way to stop the anger that he has, but it bothers me because no one has the right to kill anyone else. It also looks that he enjoys killing, is a ruthless killer.

In the other hand, we have Fortunato, an addict to wine (alcohol), at the point of losing consciousness. There came a point where he was only thinking about the Amontillado wine, there's nothing else in the whole world for him but the Amontillado.

In conclusion for me, I think that we need to take control of our anger, breathe deeply, try to think with a “cold head”, so we can take the better decisions, the anger and revenge don't take us to nothing good.