Lost Tales

by Edgar Allan Poe, Peter Haining (Editor)

Here are treasures! This is no ordinary anthology of Poe items but a unique collection of tales that in most cases have not appeared in print for well over a century and that will be completely new to all but a few Poe specialists. Then there's a group of tales that Poe acknowledged reading, and that clearly influenced tales of premature burial, of a man trapped beneath a great clanging bell, of a doomed girl reborn and doomed again. To describe this book as a "must" for all admirers of Edgar Allan Poe is surely it's so self-evident.

Genres: Classics, Fiction

188 pages, Paperback

First published October 18, 1833

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

[Sneh Pradhan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Have never read much of literature of the "horror" genre, but Poe's works are gripping , to say the least !!! This collection of tales , however was ,to my liking, abit of a downer. I found the plots somewhat half-baked and the descriptions hurried ....

[A]

i amsoulutly adore edgar and i loved this it was jsut so intite ful and i <3

[Lydia Vanderstelt · Rating 5 out of 5]

so wonderful my absolutly favorite author

[Nathan Palmer · Rating 5 out of 5]

What can you say about the father of horror that hasn't already been said?