Shakespeare, Salinger, And Poe Essay, Research Paper

For this paper, I had to choose three writers that I have read in your class, so I choose William Shakespeare, J. D. (Jerome David) Salinger, and Edgar Allen Poe and compare and contrast their writing styles.

William Shakespeare, was one of the greatest, romantic poets of all time, no other author that I am going to write about has ever, or ever will break through to as many people as Shakespeare. It was said that Shakespeare “was not of an age, but for all time,” and that is very true. Shakespeare, the only author in my paper that has not only had his works done in writing, like the others, but his work was performed on stages, and on the silver screen. Some of Shakespeare’s most famous pieces are ‘Romeo and Juliet’, ‘Hamlet’, and ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, as well as many of his sonnets. Also for a play writer, whose plays were written for a small stage theater, are now preformed on more stages than any other play in modern history.

Edgar Allen Poe mainly wrote short stories, which many of his early works were published in Philadelphia and Boston magazines. Poe himself was known “not only as a superlative author of poetry and fiction, but also as a literary critic whose level of imagination and insight had hitherto had been unapproached in American literature. Poe as well as Shakespeare, was little know during his life, it was not until well after he died that he gained recognition for his writings. Poe also contributed to world literature by not only acting as a creative author, but also as a critic of the works of his ‘contemporaries’. However like Shakespeare and Salinger , none of their work got noticed when they were first starting out writing, they all went though times of rejection and hardships. Some of Poe’s most famous writings are ‘The Raven’, and ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’.

Most of J. D. Salinger’s stories were about the experiences that he had, and wished he had during his childhood. Salinger established a reputation for himself with the novel ‘The Catcher in the Rye’, the book’s protagonist Holden Caulfield, soon became the ‘cultural prototype of adolescent rebellion’. Other works of Salinger also explored problems of the youths of the time.

I think that one of the things that all three authors have in common is that when they write, they all express their feelings, and their dreams in whatever they write. For instance Shakespeare wrote about love, Poe about Darkness, And Salinger about the problems with that era’s youth.