It’s interesting that WW Jacobs started life in England as a civil servant working in the Post Office Savings Bank. He was so financially secure that he turned down £500 (a fortune in 1898) for six short stories. His life was comfortably secure, but he wrote the great moral horror story “The Monkeys Paw”, which we have called “Beware of What you Wish For”…a civil servant writing such an imaginative, heartrending story! We never really know about what is inside people and what is in their minds.
WW Jacobs
In contrast to WW Jacobs, Edgar Allan Poe author of “The Tell-Tale Heart” was so unable to support himself in his early life, that he enlisted. He did eventually make enough money to support himself and his wife, by selling his stories and poems to various current publications. But lack of money seems to have plagued him all his life. He was paid only $9.00 for the publication of “The Raven”, stark contrast to Jacobs’ £500.
I am not comparing the two writers or their work, maybe Jacobs was the more commercial. However they both had the art of reaching into the souls and minds of people, through the medium of horror stories.
Edgar Allan Poe
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