The Weird Circle: Toll the Bell

by Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Emily Brontë

"Out of the past, phantoms of a world gone by speak again the immortal tale...." Follow the sound of crashing waves, howling winds, and tolling bells to tales of treason and vengeance, beasts and plague, haunted houses and curses, mystery and murder. These vintage chillers, written by Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Charles Dickens, Emily Bronte, Alexandre Dumas, and Guy de Maupassant, are brought to life by William Johnstone, Frank Lovejoy, Mercedes McCambridge, Eleanor Audley, Lon Clark, and more.

Episodes "Fall of the House of Usher" (Program 1), 1943; "What Was It?" (Program 7), 1943; "The Man without a Country" (Program 13), 1943; "Dr. Manette's Manuscript" (Program 14), 1943; "The Hand" (Program 17), 1943; "The 4:15 Express" (Program 21), 1943; "The Heart of Ethan Brand" (Program 25), 1944; "Wuthering Heights" (Program 31), 1944; "The Werewolf" (Program 37), 1944; "The Bell Tower" (Program 43), 1944; "The Mark of the Plague" (Program 45), 1944; "Mad Monkton" (Program 49), 1944; "The Warning" (Program 55), 1944; "The Duel Without Honor" (Program 59), 1944; "The River Man" (Program 62), 1944; "The Ancient Mariner" (Program 63), 1944; "The Goblet" (Program 70), 1944; "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (Program 74), 1944; "The Red Hand" (Program 75), 1944; "The Black Parchment" (Program 78), 1945.

Audible Audio

Published November 30, 2015

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...