Edgar Allan Poe: Tales of Mystery & Imagination

by Edgar Allan Poe, Harry Clarke (Illustrator)

1987: by Edgar Allan Poe - 304 pages - Published by Franklin Library.

304 pages, Leather Bound

Published January 1, 1987

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.

For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_al...

Reviews

[R]

I had a wonderful time challenging myself to a single Poe tale every morning!
This beautiful edition has been sitting patiently in my collection for awhile, proud to have finished reading this spectacular volume.

Thanks for your whimsically dark writings, Edgar Allan Poe. They live on.

- r

[Nicholas Zacharewicz]

I am, at best, a casual visitor to the worlds of Edgar Allan Poe's works. He has always been in the background of my picture of weird and mysterious stories of course. But I have never really dedicated myself to reading him extensively or deeply. Coming from this perspective, I think that this is a decent collection of his stories that includes the hits ("The Pit and the Pendulum", "The Cask of Amontillado", "The Masque of the Red Death") and those stories that have become lesser known over the years.

Much like the variety of works to be found in it, I also found the degree to which I enjoyed these stories varied a fair bit.

The classics, are, of course, the classics and knowing what they're about ahead of time did little to diminish them for me. However, a lot of the stories here that are lesser known (such as "MS. Found in a Bottle" or "William Wilson") were less effective not because I had already encountered them in different forms elsewhere, but because the effects they were heading towards and the roads they were taking to get there have been very well traveled in the centuries since Poe added his footprints to their early smoothing. And, since I still don't see what others do in the mystery genre, I found the two stories featuring his recurring detective character to be tedious lists of clues and conclusions rather than actual stories.

Don't get me wrong, I think this collection offers an excellent view of Poe's stories and storytelling. I merely found more enjoyment in certain parts of the landscape rather than the sum of all of its valleys, mountains, forests, and springs.