Edgar Allen Poe: The Essential Short Story Collection

by Edgar Allan Poe

Paperback

Published January 10, 2023

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.

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Reviews

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

After reading a chunk of Poe’s work, I couldn’t help but notice how much of an influence he has been on other literature and modern movies. Reading these short stories all at once was a little tiring as some stories have very similar themes so I wouldn’t recommend reading them all at once. I can however appreciate that at the time these were written, they were probably pretty unsettling and macabre.

I’m glad that I finally took the time to read some Poe but I’m not exactly seeking out more of him.

[Joanna Ingold · Rating 1 out of 5]

hate it. hate him. poor guy. didn't have to inflict it on me tho.

i love the raven and the rhyme scheme there. loved it since high school. everything else? im okay with never setting sight on a poe work again