American Authors: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe

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Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe

“To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils.” Socrates one of the greek philosophers in the 400’s BC, gives a reasonable question about the fear of death. Death affects people and characters very differently in life. In the world of literary works two very well known authors Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe present two works that both deal with the effects of this very thing the fear of death. Laid out in the next few pages we shall see that there are many connections to the works these two have done in the way that their characters are affected by the fear of death, how this is shaped by the authors life, and the way that their situations and fear of death affect the rest of their lives.

Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe were both american authors from the eighteen hundreds. Both were part of the romantic movement the two works that we are going to look at are considered part of the dark romanticism genre. The first work we are going to look at is “Young Goodman Brown” that Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in 1835 and the other one is “The Fall of The House of Usher” that Edger Allen Poe wrote in 1839. The works depict the main character on a journey. They also share that the settings are dark or even that there is a persistent evil in the time frame. Have a feeling of death or dread that something is going wrong and that the place they are could hold something very supernatural that could affect the characters in a life altering way.

A summary of “Young goo...

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