Tales & Sketches - Volume 1: 1831-1842

by Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Editor)

Esteemed as a literary critic and poet, Edgar Allan Poe was most highly acclaimed for his tales and sketches. He transformed the short story from anecdote to art, virtually created the detective story, and perfected the psychological thriller. This volume is the first of two, edited by the consummate Poe scholar Thomas Ollive Mabbott, collecting all the tales of this master of the uncanny, the unnerving, and the terrifying.
 
Poe's stories reflect his professed method of "writing as if the author were firmly impressed with the truth, yet astonished at the immensity of the wonders he related." Marrying grotesque inventiveness with superb plot construction, Poe's strikingly original tales often use only one main character and one main incident. In many of them, horror and suspense, revenge and torture, are laced with hilarious satire. Each volume is enriched with Mabbott's detailed and authoritative notes on sources, the history and collation of all known texts authorized by Poe, and variants of Poe's "final" version.
 
Volume 1 includes Poe's earliest parodies, beginning in 1831, and gathers his gothic tales written through 1842. The stories collected in this volume include "Ms. Found in a Bottle," the horrific "Berenice," "Ligeia" (which Poe considered his finest tale), "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and one of his most famous stories, "The Fall of the House of Usher."
 
Promising spine-tingling delights and sleepless nights, this annotated edition of Tales and Sketches is a treasure trove for scholars and general readers alike, confirming Poe's status as one of literary art's "most brilliant but erratic stars."
 

Genres: Short Stories, Horror, Classics

752 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1978

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

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Soon after I pledged to pursue all writings gothic and ghostly, I decided that one of my early tasks must be to read (or re-read) all the short tales of Poe, including every essay or ephemeral journal-piece that contains even a nugget of narrative. Now, thanks to the assistance of Mabbott's excellent edition, I am well on my way toward accomplishing this task, since Mabbot's comprehensive collection of stories includes every one of Poe's short works with the germ of a story or the scrap of a plot. Now, with the completion of this first volume of tales, I have read all of Poe's short narrative pieces composed between 1831 to 1842. (Those written between 1831 and 1839 I have already commented upon in my reviews of "Tales Grotesque and Arabesque").

Most of the best tales from this period are the well known ones which I first read forty or fifty years ago. I cannot say that I have here discovered--or rediscovered--any neglected gems that shine with the brightness of "Usher" or "Ligeia," but I have found a few that deserve to be in their company ("A Man of the Crowd," "The Oval Portrait")and more than a few charming, lesser works.

I was impressed by the sunny and forthright style Poet adopts in his humorous pieces, such as "Never Bet the Devil Your Head" and "A Succession of Sundays." I admired and enjoyed the aesthete in Poe, for the way his detailed description of the homely art of interior decoration (in "The Philosophy of Furniture") as well as the larger canvas of landscape ("The Landscape Garden") seem to look forward to the decadents of the fin de siecle. (Indeed, Poe excels in descriptions of every kind, including a marvelously detailed account of how a black cat opens a latched door in "Instinct vs Reason.") I was also struck by how the element of description shapes much of the content of his shorter tales ("The Island of the Fay," "The Colloquy of Monos and Una," "Eleonora," "The Masque of the Red Death"), creating something very much like a prose poem.

All in all, I now have a new appreciation for the breadth and humanity of Poe, his unrelenting curiosity and his considerable artistic and intellectual range.