Ten Great Mysteries by Edgar Allan Poe by Poe, Edgar Allan, Conklin, Groff, Docktor, Irv(June 1, 1989) Paperback

by Edgar Allan Poe

Scholastic # T210. MMPB. Contains these 10 Poe The Murders in the Rue Morgue; The Purloined Letter; The Tell-Tale Heart; The Pit and the Pendulum; The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar; A Tale of the Ragged Mountains; A Descent into the Maelstrom; The Black Cat; “Thou Art the Man”; and Metzengerstein. Illus by Irv Docktor.

Unknown Binding

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

[Mike Bright · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poe is a master painter (with words) comparable to Monet, Rembrandt, etc. Poe has a deep understanding of the human psyche that would make Freud and Maslow jealous. I know Poe's personal life was a mess, but he gifted us with some compelling tales.

This book is a sampling of Poe's short stories. My one quibble is not including the "The Mask of the Red Death", but I also can't complain about any of the selections that are included. Poe is sometimes wordy for my taste, but that was the style of his time and it does work as he applies layer upon layer of horror or just plain discomfort to the reader.

Poe's prose is vivid and powerful. Everyone should take a taste.

[Dave Moyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kind of brought me back to my HS days. It was fine, generally. I picked it up because it was laying around, and I didn't want to buy another book and screw up my Christmas list, so I wasn't super motivated, and several of the stories I had read already.