Edgar Allan Poe: Gesammelte Werke

by Edgar Allan Poe

Der amerikanische Schriftsteller Edgar Allan Poe (Poe, Edgar Allan 1809 - 1849) ist eine der schillerndsten Dichterfiguren der Weltliteratur. Mit seinen ebenso brillant wie psychologisch raffiniert erzählten Prosastücken gilt er als Urvater der Detektivgeschichte und als unübertroffener Meister des Unheimlichen, der mit messerscharfer Feder die Nachtseite der menschlichen Seele seziert. Diese breit angelegte Ausgabe seiner Werke versammelt über 40 seiner grandiosen Erzählungen, von »Berenice« über »Die denkwürdigen Erlebnisse des Artur Gordon Pym« bis hin zu »Von Kempelen und seine Entdeckung«.

Genres: Classics

832 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2012

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

[myelmtree · Rating 2 out of 5]

2,5 Sterne. Einige Geschichten, gerade die von Dupin z.B., sind großartig erzählt, mit meisterhafter Spannung. Wieder andere sind so langweilig ausschweifend, ohne jegliche Handlung. Mir ist schon bewusst, dass es zu der Zeit einer großen Hanswerkskunst gleich kam, so zu schreiben. Aber die schleppende Übersetzung tut auch nichts zum besseren Verständnis.

[Kirsten · Rating 1 out of 5]

Auch wenn ich mir für das Buch Zeit gelassen habe, ist mir die Lektüre nicht leicht gefallen. Es gab einige Geschichten und Gedichte, die mir ganz oder in Teilen gefallen haben. Aber insgesamt war mir das Ganze zu düster. Manche Figuren fand ich auch ziemlich boshaft.