What do you think?
Rate this book
El Faro
El faro ("The Light-House", en inglés) es el título no oficial de la última obra escrita por Edgar Allan Poe. El autor falleció en octubre de 1849, al poco de empezar su redacción.
4 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1849
5 people are currently reading
176 people want to read
About the author
Edgar Allan Poe
9,803 books28.7k followersThe 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...
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...
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 41 reviews
February 2, 2019
It is absolutely unbelievable to me that more people have not read this last manuscript of Poe's. It is not in my complete Poe anthology, and I can hardly find it in print anywhere. Still, the eery end of this possible fragment- and the way it coincides with Poe's incredibly mysterious death- is something we all should be discussing.
In a way, this is the creepiest thing Poe has ever written, because of its unfinished end. Most assume he died before finishing this final work, as there was allegedly enough space on the papers to keep writing, but the sudden ending utilizes a certain, very modern kind of less-is-more horror in a very unusual story. The diary-entry format of the story is something I have not seen in any of Poe's other works, and was not a common device at the time of writing. I think it's possible the abrupt cutoff- just as the reader begins to realize the ominous danger of the lighthouse, the diary entry is interrupted and the diary suddenly ends- is an experimental ending to a very experimental story. If intentionally left unfinished, it's far ahead of its time. But even if it really is a fragment, certain disquieting elements of this story are still very unlike Poe's other settings.
I have one more theory. Of the possible explanations for Poe's sudden, delirious death- and there are many, ranging from various illnesses to poll kidnapping and subsequent hypothermia to a bad reaction to alcohol due to a brain tumor- the majority of theories, and first-person accounts, report a number of days of insanity before the death of the writer. I think it's possible this last, unfinished story was a true, delirious diary, written at some point under the influence of some fever or alcohol or illness. I think it's possible Poe was writing, believing he truly was keeping a diary of some sort of break from society, alone in a lighthouse, when he really was alone in his near-delirious mind.
There are so many things we don't know, and probably never will, about the death of the great Edgar Allan Poe. So many clues and eyewitness accounts just don't fit well together. But this story is something people too often overlook.
Even if you have no interest in the life and death of Edgar Allan Poe, this is a quick, beautiful, terrifying read.
In a way, this is the creepiest thing Poe has ever written, because of its unfinished end. Most assume he died before finishing this final work, as there was allegedly enough space on the papers to keep writing, but the sudden ending utilizes a certain, very modern kind of less-is-more horror in a very unusual story. The diary-entry format of the story is something I have not seen in any of Poe's other works, and was not a common device at the time of writing. I think it's possible the abrupt cutoff- just as the reader begins to realize the ominous danger of the lighthouse, the diary entry is interrupted and the diary suddenly ends- is an experimental ending to a very experimental story. If intentionally left unfinished, it's far ahead of its time. But even if it really is a fragment, certain disquieting elements of this story are still very unlike Poe's other settings.
I have one more theory. Of the possible explanations for Poe's sudden, delirious death- and there are many, ranging from various illnesses to poll kidnapping and subsequent hypothermia to a bad reaction to alcohol due to a brain tumor- the majority of theories, and first-person accounts, report a number of days of insanity before the death of the writer. I think it's possible this last, unfinished story was a true, delirious diary, written at some point under the influence of some fever or alcohol or illness. I think it's possible Poe was writing, believing he truly was keeping a diary of some sort of break from society, alone in a lighthouse, when he really was alone in his near-delirious mind.
There are so many things we don't know, and probably never will, about the death of the great Edgar Allan Poe. So many clues and eyewitness accounts just don't fit well together. But this story is something people too often overlook.
Even if you have no interest in the life and death of Edgar Allan Poe, this is a quick, beautiful, terrifying read.
October 9, 2020
"Por otra parte, me apetecía estar solo... ¡Hay que ver! ¡Nunca hasta hoy había reparado en el sonido aterrador de ese vocable, "solo"! Podía pensar que tal singular sonoridad se debía al eco que producen estas paredes cilíndricas; pero, ¡qué tonterías estoy diciendo!"
Encontrado entre los pocos papeles que quedaron de Poe a su muerte, este cuento pintaba para ser realmente bueno, pero esta lo sorprendió, transformándolo en leyenda.
Una verdadera pena...
Encontrado entre los pocos papeles que quedaron de Poe a su muerte, este cuento pintaba para ser realmente bueno, pero esta lo sorprendió, transformándolo en leyenda.
Una verdadera pena...
December 27, 2020
Ler obras inacabadas é sempre um misto de: quero mais e imaginar o potencial da obra se estivesse acabada.
January 21, 2020
I came across this because we just watched the film The Lighthouse, and found out it's loosely based on this incomplete story, Poe's last.
One really has to wonder where he was going with this story. It starts out pretty innocuous but the sudden end in almost mid-thought leaves the reader with a sense of dread.
One really has to wonder where he was going with this story. It starts out pretty innocuous but the sudden end in almost mid-thought leaves the reader with a sense of dread.
December 5, 2020
Wow! All I can say considering this was Poe's last written manuscript with that eerie last entry followed shortly afterwards with his own mysterious death gives me the Heevy Jeevies! This MS had so much potential-4 Stars given for what could have been.
"The title The Lighthouse was assigned by George E. Woodberry, who first published the text of pages 2-4 in The Life of Edgar Allan Poe (1909), volume II, pp. 397-399. Although the title is not Poe’s own, it is sufficiently descriptive and has been accepted by subsequent editors and scholars." https://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/lig...
"Feelings of foreboding are the subject of an extraordinary, untitled tale that Poe wrote at about this time, [May-August 1849] but did not publish. Only two pages long in modern editions, it consists of entries in a journal between the first and third of January 1796. The last words of the tale, as if to begin a new entry are, 'Jan. 4.' But here the journal, and the tale, end. Nothing follows the date but the blankness of the page—perhaps because Poe left the tale incomplete, perhaps because he so meant to indicate the death of the narrator, a lighthouse keeper." Silverman, Kenneth. (1991). Edgar A. Poe : mournful and never-ending remembrance. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. (412-13)
"The title The Lighthouse was assigned by George E. Woodberry, who first published the text of pages 2-4 in The Life of Edgar Allan Poe (1909), volume II, pp. 397-399. Although the title is not Poe’s own, it is sufficiently descriptive and has been accepted by subsequent editors and scholars." https://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/lig...
"Feelings of foreboding are the subject of an extraordinary, untitled tale that Poe wrote at about this time, [May-August 1849] but did not publish. Only two pages long in modern editions, it consists of entries in a journal between the first and third of January 1796. The last words of the tale, as if to begin a new entry are, 'Jan. 4.' But here the journal, and the tale, end. Nothing follows the date but the blankness of the page—perhaps because Poe left the tale incomplete, perhaps because he so meant to indicate the death of the narrator, a lighthouse keeper." Silverman, Kenneth. (1991). Edgar A. Poe : mournful and never-ending remembrance. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. (412-13)
April 1, 2022
Difficult to rate this story as it’s not clear whether it is finished or not. This very short story was written shortly before Poe’s death so it is very possible that it was unfinished. In that case, I can’t rate it as it’s just a fragment and shouldn’t be judged as complete. Another theory is that it is complete and the abrupt ending intentional to indicate an abrupt ending of the narrator. In that case, I would give this story 4 stars for being told in so few words and a creatively haunting ending. And since I prefer the latter theory, I will believe it true and rate this story 4 stars.
June 13, 2020
It is always a pleasure and joy after completing an authors works to suddenly find a book you haven’t read. This is Poe’s last novel/ novella about a man working in a Lighthouse. Set in Diary Format, similar to that of Bram Stokers Dracula. Right from the start, this is a dark story and you can read the madness creeping in to the man’s mind.
It is a shame Poe never got to complete this piece.
It is a shame Poe never got to complete this piece.
February 12, 2020
Para entender melhor o que o protagonista de "Se um viajante numa noite de inverno" sente toda vez que um novo romance é interrompido, escolhi uma obra incompleta do Poe para ler. Mesmo em um texto tão curto, muitas das principais características de seu estilo estão presentes: a exploração psicológica de um personagem paranoico, o tema do isolamento e a relação ambígua do narrador com essa solidão, um comportamento misantropo com relação à sociedade, além do presságio opressor e constante de uma tragédia futura, mas próxima. Uma pena que ele tenha falecido antes de concluir o conto, porque ele é muito promissor nestas poucas páginas.
March 6, 2025
Un hombre ha sido asignado para custodiar un faro en las costas de Noruega. Parece ser el responsable del trabajo de tres personas pero es lo suficientemente capaz para asumir su labor. Los días transitan en completa calma, el oleaje se desplaza apacible, una que otra ave sobrevuela la zona, el faro es una construcción segura. El hombre prontamente se aburre y decide llevar una bitácora de lo acontecido en sus días.
Esta fue la última obra en la que trabajó Poe, encontró la muerte muy pronto y no logró terminarla. Es una lástima porque poseía elementos importantes que la hubiesen convertido en una gran historia.
Esta fue la última obra en la que trabajó Poe, encontró la muerte muy pronto y no logró terminarla. Es una lástima porque poseía elementos importantes que la hubiesen convertido en una gran historia.
December 31, 2024
This is just one of those fascinating things in literature and history. Poe's mysterious last manuscript was written before his equally mysterious end. Like all unfinished works, along with my obsession with Poe's works, there is always that element of what could have been in an author who passed before completing their works. I wish I could have read it in its entirety, but its existence in this state and context is magnificent and not something I would so easily erase. It's just too damn good of a situation and mystery.
https://www.eapoe.org/works/reading/p...
https://www.eapoe.org/works/reading/p...
September 1, 2023
É um conto (ou seja curto) inacabado (ou seja muito curto), li por pura curiosidade; não faço a menor ideia de por onde ia, mas tive a impressão de que eu até ia gostar. São alguns extratos do que seria o diário de um operador de farol, mas temos a história cortada quase que de cara. Uma ironiazinha no primeiro extrato do diário, em que o narrador comenta não saber o quanto conseguirá escrever porque sabe que pode morrer a qualquer momento enfim…
December 4, 2020
3.5 Stars
I enjoyed this story and I wanted more from this diary formatting but unfortunately, Poe did not get the chance to finish this foreboding tale that coincides with his mysterious death. It's extremely eerie how he captured the essence of loneliness and paranoia right before befalling to his own death which makes it even more creepy.
I enjoyed this story and I wanted more from this diary formatting but unfortunately, Poe did not get the chance to finish this foreboding tale that coincides with his mysterious death. It's extremely eerie how he captured the essence of loneliness and paranoia right before befalling to his own death which makes it even more creepy.
August 19, 2024
Another beautiful story by Poe. Apparently written right before his death, this makes the story twice as creepy. Written as journal entries about a lighthouse, this story was so short, I wondered if Poe had more planned before he died. Still worth the read, and an interesting one since this was his last.
November 16, 2024
Este cuento tenía muy buena pinta, ojalá Poe lo hubiera terminado, seguramente hubiera sido su último buen cuento, atrapante y con su característica prosa que cuando quiere funcionar, funciona.
Es triste e inquietante pensar en como la muerte lo atrapó antes de poder concluir esta obra, realmente te pone a pensar.
Es triste e inquietante pensar en como la muerte lo atrapó antes de poder concluir esta obra, realmente te pone a pensar.
December 5, 2020
Read this unfinished story online- it’s only a few pages. I do want to read the Robert Bloch version where he finished Poe’s story. I just watched the 2019 horror movie The Lighthouse and I see where parts could have been pulled from Poe. Very dark.
https://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/lig...
https://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/lig...
January 17, 2023
É difícil avaliar um texto não finalizado, mas as poucas páginas que temos aqui são fascinantes. Se tratando de uma obra de Edgar Allan Poe, é fácil se perder ao fim da leitura, imaginando que rumos essa história teria tomado se o autor a tivesse terminado.
April 11, 2025
I must say Robert Eggers definitely extrapolated a LOT out of this story … it’s a nice proof of concept tale though. I feel like I’d love a finished version (though it may actually be finished). This being Poe’s last work is a cool little side note too.
August 17, 2025
A beautiful beginning that leaves a void from an unfinished story. It would be interesting to know how this story would have ended, but unfortunately this mystery has left our world along with the greatest Edgar Allan Poe.
August 14, 2020
It help me to write my own version of this incomplete tale. Thank you so much Edgar Allan Poe for the good idea and the stage.
October 13, 2020
A great beginning, it's real pity it was never finished.
Read
December 28, 2021Not complete, but what there is is interesting
May 3, 2022
Una lástima que nunca se llegó a terminar este relato
September 21, 2022
It's nicely written, but come on, it is just a page left on Poe's desk when he died, I don't understand people treating this as a masterpiece.
December 9, 2022
Realmente quiero pensar q termina así xq el personaje muere, pero es muy evidente q quedó inconcluso x la muerte de Allan poe
February 22, 2023
La nota final decía que era un cuento que posiblemente estaba inconcluso debido a la muerte del autor, aunque un biógrafo afirma que así es el final. Yo me voy por el primero
Read
August 2, 2023Edgar Allan Poe hablado de la soledad >>
(no le pongo nota porque es un relato inacabado y no sé cómo valorarlo jeje)
(no le pongo nota porque es un relato inacabado y no sé cómo valorarlo jeje)
December 5, 2023
The 52 Book Club’s 2023 Challenge: 13. Published posthumously
he was going somewhere with this... too bad it's so short and he didn't have time to finish it :(
he was going somewhere with this... too bad it's so short and he didn't have time to finish it :(
December 16, 2023
Relato inconcluso se cree que su muerte repentina evito que lo concluyera.
Las pocas páginas hablan de un guardia de un faro y la soledad en la que vive.
Las pocas páginas hablan de un guardia de un faro y la soledad en la que vive.
June 15, 2024
It's less than one page, but a great start of what could have been among his greatest works
Displaying 1 - 30 of 41 reviews