The Unabridged Edgar Allan Poe

by Edgar Allan Poe

Mass Market Paperback

Published June 3, 1983

About the author

The name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, and The Fall of the House of Usher. This versatile writer’s oeuvre includes short stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a book of scientific theory, and hundreds of essays and book reviews. He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the science fiction genre, but he made his living as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. Poe’s reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry.

Just as the bizarre characters in Poe’s stories have captured the public imagination so too has Poe himself. He is seen as a morbid, mysterious figure lurking in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or crumbling castles. This is the Poe of legend. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame the author’s name.

The real Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston on January 19, 1809. Edgar was the second of three children. His other brother William Henry Leonard Poe would also become a poet before his early death, and Poe’s sister Rosalie Poe would grow up to teach penmanship at a Richmond girls’ school. Within three years of Poe’s birth both of his parents had died, and he was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia while Poe’s siblings went to live with other families. Mr. Allan would rear Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe had dreams of being a writer in emulation of his childhood hero the British poet Lord Byron. Early poetic verses found written in a young Poe’s handwriting on the backs of Allan’s ledger sheets reveal how little interest Poe had in the tobacco business.

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Reviews

[Joseph K · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whew, I’m finished! My summer reading project took a year and a half to complete. We’re all familiar with the poetry, the prose, and the tales of mystery and suspense—this tome has it all. I was surprised to find that a couple of his stories could even be classified as primitive science fiction: one features a man who takes a hot-air balloon to the moon and brings back an alien; another follows a ship sailing south to Antarctica that encounters a fierce tribe of indigenous people.

Also surprising was an essay criticizing contemporary author James Fenimore Cooper. To mix things up, there’s even a story about frontiersmen fur traders exploring the Pacific Northwest. There’s something for everyone to like in this massive collection (1,178 pages) of all of Edgar Allan Poe’s work.

His work and influence will last forever—from pioneering the detective story to being referenced in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, to inspiring the name of the Baltimore Ravens football team. Even at close to 2,000 pages, Edgar Allan Poe’s influence is far greater than the sum of his work.