Selected Works of Edgar Allan Poe

by Edgar Allan Poe

These stories and poems come from the mind of one of the earliest masters of macabre literature.From the mysterious to the macabre, the works of Edgar Allan Poe have the power to evoke readers’ deepest emotions. Poe’s stories and poems explore the darker side of life and still offer lessons and insight into human behavior today. This Word Cloud edition presents many of Poe’s best-known works, including “The Raven,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” along with dozens of other short stories and poems. 

Genres: Classics, Poetry, Fiction, Short Stories, Horror, Novels, Literature

448 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 23, 2020

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

[Helga Cohen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poe is the kind of writer that can be read numerous times. I have lost count of the many times I have read some of these stories. His stories are always memorable works. He was a writer of macabre/gothic and dark and deductive crime fiction. Many of his stories have been immortalized in Hammer films. Poe was a pioneer of the genre and had a clever deep mind.

This book included the classics, “The Pit and the Pendulum”, “The Cask of Amontillado”, “The Tell Tale Heart”, “The Fall of the House of Usher” and others. These stories remain with you and by reading them, you understand the genius behind the author.

[Samuel Massicotte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Favorite quotes:
# Selected Works of Edgar Allan Poe

“The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaal”

> Unless for default of this renovation, I could see no reason, therefore, why life could not be sustained even in a vacuum; for the expansion and compression of chest, commonly called breathing, is action purely muscular, and the cause, not the effect, of respiration. In a word, I conceived that, as the body should become habituated to the want of atmospheric pressure, the sensations of pain would gradually diminish-and to endure them while they continued, I relied with confidence upon the hardihood of my constitution
>



“A Descent into the Maelström”

> The mountain trembled to its very base, and the rock rocked. I threw myself upon my face, and clung to the scant herbage in an excess of nervous agitation. “This” said I at length, to the old man- “This can be nothing else than the great whirlpool of the Maelström”
>

“The Murders in the Rue Morgue

> I see that no animal but an Orang-Outang, of the species here mentioned, could have impressed the indentations as you have traced them
>

“The Tell-Tale Heart

> “Villains!” I shrieked, “dissemble me no more! I admit the deed!-tear up the planks!here, here!-It is the beating of his hideous heart!
>

“Hop-Frog”

> “I now see distinctly,” he said, “what manner of people these maskers are. They are a great king and his seven privy-councillors-a king who does not scruple to strike a defenceless girl and his seven councillors who abet him in the outrage. As for myself, I am simply Hop-Frog, the jerster-and this is my last jest”
>

[Corey Norton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection was a great mix of the different genres of Poe (both in prose and poetic form). I didn't realize quite how far Poe extended beyond the horror genre he's most known for. Obviously the horror stories/poems are the best ones, but I did also really enjoy all of the detective mysteries in this collection, as well as some of the stranger, harder to categorize stories (see The Gold Bug and The Unparalleled Adventure of one Hans Pfall).

[Litsa · Rating 1 out of 5]

Raven is good. I like the idea of entombing someone alive is the Cask of Amontillado. Murders in the Eye Morgue seemed like a cop out to end on an orangutan. The fall of the house of Usher, Red Death, and Purloined Letter were boring. Tell Tale Heart was ok I guess.... This guy was like a one hit wonder.

[Andjela Filipovic · Rating 4 out of 5]

A difficult but excusite read, the macabre aspect is right my cup of tea. And the cryptograph was a cherry on top, it was challenging but fun solving it by myself!

[Maven_Reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review of Selected Works of Edgar Allan Poe by Edgar Allan Poe

Selected Works of Edgar Allan Poe gathers some of Poe’s most memorable tales and poems into one place, creating a mosaic of mystery, imagination, and emotional intensity. Moving through stories like “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Black Cat,” and poems such as “The Raven,” I felt as though I was traveling through the shifting corridors of Poe’s mind, dark, lyrical, and strangely beautiful. Each piece carries its own distinct atmosphere, whether it’s the psychological tension of an unreliable narrator or the musical melancholy of his verse. Even though these works are widely known, encountering them together in a curated collection gives them a surprising cohesion.

Unlike some collections that feel uneven, this one invites you to sit with Poe’s evolving obsessions, fear, guilt, love, loss, imagination and notice how he shapes each theme with rhythmic language and vivid imagery. I found myself lingering on the emotional texture of the stories as much as the plot, especially in the way Poe plays with sound, repetition, and pacing. If there’s one gentle observation I’d make, it’s that the ornate writing style may feel slow to readers used to modern pacing, but that same stylistic richness is exactly what creates the haunting charm that lingers long after closing the book.

Rating: 4 / 5. I chose this rating because the collection masterfully showcases Poe’s range and emotional reach, offering an experience that is atmospheric, imaginative, and still surprisingly relatable today.

[Percy Banks · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was such a pretty book, the art, the poems, and stories. “The life upon her yellow hair but not within her eyes The life still there, upon her hair—the death upon her eyes.”

[Andrew Fehribach · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is Poe, speaks for itself really. There’ll keep being works in here to return to, so it’s not really “read” so much as temporarily not “reading.”

[Mandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Traditional classics, good collection of his works. However, I’d probably skip the adventure of Hans Pfaal. Poe was just absolutely gluttonous in his scientific reasoning and description

[Clowie]

Poe makes me feel so illiterate x I’ll eventually have time for him again…

[Jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

The twisted mind of Poe is one that stands out from the many other great authors humanity has produced. In this curated selection, Poe's beautifully dark flair for the macabre is evident in nearly all works. Speaking on the collection itself, all of Poe's greatest works are included providing ample food for thought to any reader who likes their literature rooted in darkness. I have to give this collection a five-star rating for its containment of such classics as The Pit and the Pendulum, The Cask of Amontillado, and, of course, The Raven alone. This would surely be enough to warrant such a recommendation, but with them come many other, less known, but still wonderful stories and poems. Not to say all of Poe's work was without flaws, but his literary genius is inarguable and everlasting. In short, I would recommend a collection such as this to experienced and novice readers alike, and would like to finish this review with some words of Poe himself,
"And the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, 'Man,'
And its hero the Conqueror Worm."
- Edgar Allan Poe, excerpt from Ligeia.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel like this is tough to assign a review score to, just because the quality is so varied here. Like Poe at his best is unmatched, but this has a lot of Poe at his not-so-great. Still, it’s fascinating to see how many of the lesser-known works still have the DNA of the better stories, and how many seem to be him trying out entirely new ideas I never would’ve expected from Poe - like the Hans Pfaall story that reads like an early version of The Martian with early 19th century understandings of space travel, an essay on Diddling, or the fact that the sequel to him basically inventing the detective genre is him basically inventing the true crime genre (in that he’s making a story out of a real life crime and trying to solve it within that story). There’s a lot of interesting stuff here, even if some of it is a slog (in general Poe seems better the shorter his pieces are). Definitely interesting to get a wider perspective, and you still have most of the classics in here, and those still hold up to this day (besides the extreme racism in The Goldbug and the fact that Hop Frog is just a story of ableism vs fatphobia)

[Xavier Reittinger · Rating 5 out of 5]

I liked this book a lot Edgar Allen Poe was a very imaginative person the stories could be very dark but also most of them were very interesting. I liked a lot of the stories in this book I couldn't really choose a singular one I liked they were all really good. Some of them are mysteries and some of them were mythological stuff. The book is very hard to understand considering it was written a long time ago but it can be hard to understand for some people after the first few stories it became really interesting.

I don't want to say much about the story but there was a lot of interesting stuff I did enjoy this book it was very good. If you really like stuff from the poets this is definitely a book you should read. The book can be dark and compelling and is a very serious book if you truly comprehend what he's saying. I won't spoil much about it if you haven't read it but I would definitely recommend this book if your up for the challenge of finishing the whole thing.

[EmE · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oct 2022 Selections

The Fall of the House of Usher - 4⭐️
The Murders in the Rue Morgue - 3⭐️
The Masque of the Red Death - 4⭐️
The Pit and the Pendulum- 4⭐️
The Black Cat - 5⭐️ story (1⭐️ for horrific content) *This was difficult to rate! I hated this and was transfixed at the same time.
The Tell-Tale Heart - 5⭐️
The Premature Burial - 2⭐️
The Raven - 5⭐️

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good place to start for someone who wants to introduce themselves to Poe's work. All his classic tales and poems are included in this volume. Poe is a master at "word painting" as you can get yourself solidly immersed into the stories characters and surroundings.

[Sofie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read various spooky stories for Halloween, but not the entire volume. I figured this was more fair than adding each short story individually.

[paperbackfruit · Rating 5 out of 5]

I LOVE THIS COLLECTION SO MUCH <3

[Alexandra Dodd · Rating 3 out of 5]

Made it through half, so I count that as a win on this one. Edgar Allen Poe is kinda overrated. Couple of short story gems, the rest are meh.

[books-on-a-wire · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Fall of the House of Usher... 4 stars (re-read)
The Masque of the Red Death... 4 stars (first read)
The Black Cat... 5 stars (first read)
The Raven... 4 stars (re-read)