Edgar Allan Poe Stories

by Edgar Allan Poe, Laura Benet (Introduction)

A writer's name usually brings to mind a definite place, country or person. Edgar Allan Poe's name evokes no such clear image but rather a mood, a dim unquiet atmosphere of dungeons and dank tombs, of ill-fated beings, doomed decaying houses and unearthly mysteries.

Poe was our first great writer of spine-chilling, macabre, and grisly tales - and he is still the master. He also wrote our first detective and science fiction. Even more than that he was a brilliant critic and a remarkable poet.

This volume includes his best stories - "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Pit and The Pendulum," "The Purloined Letter," and many others - with a selection of Poe's choicest poems. In addition, Poe himself is the subject of a fascinating introduction, written especially for this book by Laura Benet, author of The Young Edgar Allan Poe.

The telltale heart; The masque of the red death; The cask of Amontillado; Metzengerstein; The pit and the pendulum; The fall of the house of Usher; The black cat; A tale of the ragged mountains; The oblong box; The murders in the Rue Morgue; The purloined letter; MS. found in a bottle; The oval portrait; Berenice; A descent into the maelstrom; Thou art the man; Mystification; The sphinx; The imp of the perverse; The premature burial; William Wilson; The assignation; Ligeia; Morella; Shadow; The conversation of Eiros and Charmion; Silence; Selected poems: The raven; The bells; Ulalume; Eldorado; Israfel; Annabel Lee; To Helen; To my mother.

510 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1961

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

[Lauren Moreau · Rating 4 out of 5]

excellent book, although it takes longer to read it is still very good!