What do you think?
Rate this book
The Selected Writings
An anthology of stories from Edgar Allan Poe. Includes The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Cask of Amontillado, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Masque of the Red Death, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Purloined Letter, and The Raven. Preface gives brief biography.
136 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1849
23 people are currently reading
832 people want to read
About the author
Edgar Allan Poe
9,897 books28.5k 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 - 23 of 23 reviews
September 2, 2018
2.5 stars? Maybe?
Look, I'm the first to admit that I'm not the biggest fan of poetry... like, at all. But the few short stories that we also had to read for class kind of made up for my poetical problems, so I'm being generous and rounding up to 3 stars with my rating.
Read for a uni subject on Gothic fiction.
*Probably should be noted as well that we didn't have to read the entire text for uni, only a selection of works.
Look, I'm the first to admit that I'm not the biggest fan of poetry... like, at all. But the few short stories that we also had to read for class kind of made up for my poetical problems, so I'm being generous and rounding up to 3 stars with my rating.
Read for a uni subject on Gothic fiction.
*Probably should be noted as well that we didn't have to read the entire text for uni, only a selection of works.
February 9, 2022
I've never read many of Poe's short stories nor essays. We had to delve into the world of Poe this semester for my class, and I was shocked and pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed his short stories. Many of them remind me of a dark and twisted version of one of my favorite stories -- Alice in Wonderland, and therefore I enjoyed many of them. There was always a sense of "is this real?" and I think that added a lot of excitement and wonder to his stories. Overall, I really enjoyed his stories and the twisted aspects that came with them!
February 28, 2023
I usually don’t review classic lit because that’s not my training and there’s probably not much I can add to the conversation but I think I’ll start providing a few words on the editions I read (usually the Norton Critical Editions if I can). This one is a behemoth. By far the longest Norton Edition of a book I’ve read at about 1,000 large pages with small print. If you’re serious about reading Poe and understanding the historical/social/psychological/literary context of his work, I’d be surprised if there’s any single volume better than this.
Its selection of verse and prose gives a balanced sampling of Poe’s range which is much wider than I thought. Sure, there are the classic poems and tales everyone’s familiar with like The Raven and The Fall of the House of Usher with their unique combination of the gothic, grotesque, and arabesque (the three-fold themes the editor organizes the content and commentary around) but there are also farcical, whimsical tales like Loss of Breathe and Never Bet the Devil Your Head; the pathbreaking ‘works of ratiocination’ like The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Purloined Letter which established the detective story formula half a century before Arthur Conan Doyle wrote A Study in Scarlet; satires like King Pest and How to Write a Blackwood Story critiquing the corrupt aspects of Jacksonian democracy and the literary cliques gatekeeping success in (primarily Northern) journals/magazines; and over a hundred pages of letters, essays, and reviews which illuminate details of Poe’s biography, psychology, and his philosophy of art.
After 700 pages we move from Poe and his peers to his secondary and tertiary influences such as the then-popular pseudosciences of physiognomy and phrenology as well as German Idealist philosophy and aesthetics. The selections of Kant, Schelling, and Schlegel were particularly helpful in clarifying the relationship between Poe’s philosophy of unity-in-difference, originary holism, anti-didacticism, and poesy as the expression of beauty as opposed to truth with continental philosophy.
The critical essays which conclude the book were well chosen and explored many facets of Poe’s body of work in enough variety to interest anyone in almost every branch of literary criticism. Stuvall and Colin’s essays cover Poe’s debts to Coleridge, Schlegel, Tucker, Archibald, and others; Wilbur reads Poe allegorically and explains the symbolic content of his motifs (eg. winding passages, enclosed/circumscribed settings, vertiginous swooning episodes, etc.); Gargano contrasts Poe’s “authorial poise” with his narrators’ general “confusion and blindness” to argue against their identification and for recognizing Poe’s sense of irony with respect to his characters; Moldenhauer explores murder as an aesthetic category which operates in Poe’s fiction to reconcile “divided and opposed things into single wholes or unities” by transcending the material world; Eakin explores the Lazarus motif in which death and rebirth figure centrally in several of Poe’s works but primarily in his sole novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym…a topic further developed by Farrell who connects it to Poe’s overarching philosophy of overcoming difference to attain perfect unity; and Armstrong explores the motif of ‘doubling’ as it is used in The Purloined Letter.
Armand argues an interesting if not completely convincing thesis that Poe found the “monomyth” Romanticism had been looking for in the “daring mixture of the Gothic and the Egyptian” in The Fall of the House of Usher. Clearly I got little out of Riddel’s critical essay since I have only sparse notes on it so I’ll skip. Kennedy’s brilliant essay situated the Gothic movement in general and its attitude toward death in the context of post-Enlightenment skepticism about the scope of rational thought during a period of collapsing order with revolutions in both politics (French) and philosophy (Kant), demonstrating Poe’s contribution to the Gothic dramatization of the peculiarly modern flavor of “death-anxiety”. Rowe’s psycholinguistic textual reading of Poe’s work as it relates to race and antebellum Southern attitudes was less convincing than Whalen’s response observing that the alleged ‘depoliticization’ of Poe is less the work of contemporary commentators and more the author’s own avoidance of controversial topics like slavery (though that in no way absolves the latter of his “average racism” which, of course, permeates his stories). Finally, Irwin’s critique of Barbara Johnson’s response to Derrida’s rejoinder to Lacan’s reading of The Purloined Letter was exceedingly clever but without much substance. Then again, maybe it went over my head or I was just exhausted at this point with the book. Still, 5/5 from me overall.
Its selection of verse and prose gives a balanced sampling of Poe’s range which is much wider than I thought. Sure, there are the classic poems and tales everyone’s familiar with like The Raven and The Fall of the House of Usher with their unique combination of the gothic, grotesque, and arabesque (the three-fold themes the editor organizes the content and commentary around) but there are also farcical, whimsical tales like Loss of Breathe and Never Bet the Devil Your Head; the pathbreaking ‘works of ratiocination’ like The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Purloined Letter which established the detective story formula half a century before Arthur Conan Doyle wrote A Study in Scarlet; satires like King Pest and How to Write a Blackwood Story critiquing the corrupt aspects of Jacksonian democracy and the literary cliques gatekeeping success in (primarily Northern) journals/magazines; and over a hundred pages of letters, essays, and reviews which illuminate details of Poe’s biography, psychology, and his philosophy of art.
After 700 pages we move from Poe and his peers to his secondary and tertiary influences such as the then-popular pseudosciences of physiognomy and phrenology as well as German Idealist philosophy and aesthetics. The selections of Kant, Schelling, and Schlegel were particularly helpful in clarifying the relationship between Poe’s philosophy of unity-in-difference, originary holism, anti-didacticism, and poesy as the expression of beauty as opposed to truth with continental philosophy.
The critical essays which conclude the book were well chosen and explored many facets of Poe’s body of work in enough variety to interest anyone in almost every branch of literary criticism. Stuvall and Colin’s essays cover Poe’s debts to Coleridge, Schlegel, Tucker, Archibald, and others; Wilbur reads Poe allegorically and explains the symbolic content of his motifs (eg. winding passages, enclosed/circumscribed settings, vertiginous swooning episodes, etc.); Gargano contrasts Poe’s “authorial poise” with his narrators’ general “confusion and blindness” to argue against their identification and for recognizing Poe’s sense of irony with respect to his characters; Moldenhauer explores murder as an aesthetic category which operates in Poe’s fiction to reconcile “divided and opposed things into single wholes or unities” by transcending the material world; Eakin explores the Lazarus motif in which death and rebirth figure centrally in several of Poe’s works but primarily in his sole novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym…a topic further developed by Farrell who connects it to Poe’s overarching philosophy of overcoming difference to attain perfect unity; and Armstrong explores the motif of ‘doubling’ as it is used in The Purloined Letter.
Armand argues an interesting if not completely convincing thesis that Poe found the “monomyth” Romanticism had been looking for in the “daring mixture of the Gothic and the Egyptian” in The Fall of the House of Usher. Clearly I got little out of Riddel’s critical essay since I have only sparse notes on it so I’ll skip. Kennedy’s brilliant essay situated the Gothic movement in general and its attitude toward death in the context of post-Enlightenment skepticism about the scope of rational thought during a period of collapsing order with revolutions in both politics (French) and philosophy (Kant), demonstrating Poe’s contribution to the Gothic dramatization of the peculiarly modern flavor of “death-anxiety”. Rowe’s psycholinguistic textual reading of Poe’s work as it relates to race and antebellum Southern attitudes was less convincing than Whalen’s response observing that the alleged ‘depoliticization’ of Poe is less the work of contemporary commentators and more the author’s own avoidance of controversial topics like slavery (though that in no way absolves the latter of his “average racism” which, of course, permeates his stories). Finally, Irwin’s critique of Barbara Johnson’s response to Derrida’s rejoinder to Lacan’s reading of The Purloined Letter was exceedingly clever but without much substance. Then again, maybe it went over my head or I was just exhausted at this point with the book. Still, 5/5 from me overall.
January 14, 2009
This review applies to the Norton Critical Edition of "The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe."
I bought this to supplement my reading of the complete Library of America edition, because the footnotes there were very sparse and I needed guidance. This seemed like it offered that. But it didn't; the editorial work was entirely unsatisfactory and simple-minded. A lot of Poe merits substantial annotation, but this editor isn't equipped to do it; his footnotes seem to be copied verbatim either from encyclopedias or from Thomas Mabbott's standard edition, in both cases seemingly without full comprehension. The selections (and supplements) are okay but curated rather unhelpfully, and there is a consistent and annoying emphasis on extremely peripheral issues like Poe's stances on race and politics. I'm sure those are academically fashionable subjects these days, but that doesn't make them any more relevant.
This edition certainly reminded me of academia, but not of actual scholarship.
I bought this to supplement my reading of the complete Library of America edition, because the footnotes there were very sparse and I needed guidance. This seemed like it offered that. But it didn't; the editorial work was entirely unsatisfactory and simple-minded. A lot of Poe merits substantial annotation, but this editor isn't equipped to do it; his footnotes seem to be copied verbatim either from encyclopedias or from Thomas Mabbott's standard edition, in both cases seemingly without full comprehension. The selections (and supplements) are okay but curated rather unhelpfully, and there is a consistent and annoying emphasis on extremely peripheral issues like Poe's stances on race and politics. I'm sure those are academically fashionable subjects these days, but that doesn't make them any more relevant.
This edition certainly reminded me of academia, but not of actual scholarship.
December 31, 2016
Not all Poe produced was gold, but there are soms real gems in his oeuvre. For me especially "The Pit and the Pendulum" and the realism of the "Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym" excelled. That last, longer story is really hallucinating, very detailed, pseudo realistic, enhanced by scientific-sounding descriptions. And that written even before the middle of the 19th century!
May 28, 2020
An excellent collection of Edgar Allan Poe's work the annotations of the text are top notch and the essays cover a broad range of topics relating to Poe and his work.
June 27, 2020
Excellent student/teaching resource, more oriented for tertiary than secondary level.
December 6, 2021
Great selection. Unlike other Norton products, the footnotes always felt needed and relevant.
January 24, 2022
Required reading as a student.
February 8, 2024
big poe fan, nicely annotated. read for a class :) 🐈⬛🗝
September 10, 2024
funny dude. somehow controversial but the raven is silly. everyone dreams of finding their ligeia.
June 8, 2012
So I needed to read some of Poe's works for my Advanced Literary Theory class and the ones in the textbook I was given were pretty straightforward. I picked up this little copy at work (since I work in a bookstore) and started going through this copy instead. Ok, anything put out by Norton Critical Edition is a-okay by me!
Not only did they have the poems and short stories and had some incredibly detailed footnotes to help give you a little bit of background on the piece or the biography of the author (critics who practice New Criticism will be whining right about now), but they also filled it with various essays that other writers wrote about Poe's work. One of them is even by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
I am a big fan of Poe's work because I love approaching his work from a psychoanalytical view (thanks to two years of Literature classes that focused on just psychoanalysis in literature). So if you want to read something with a little deeper information to it, pick this up and add it to your collection.
Not only did they have the poems and short stories and had some incredibly detailed footnotes to help give you a little bit of background on the piece or the biography of the author (critics who practice New Criticism will be whining right about now), but they also filled it with various essays that other writers wrote about Poe's work. One of them is even by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
I am a big fan of Poe's work because I love approaching his work from a psychoanalytical view (thanks to two years of Literature classes that focused on just psychoanalysis in literature). So if you want to read something with a little deeper information to it, pick this up and add it to your collection.
December 17, 2010
Intense. That is how I would describe Poe and his work. If you aren't willing to match his intensity as you read a collection of his poetry and fiction then you may not get much out of it. Poe's prose and poetry is thick and contains many reference to things outside common knowledge. Footnotes can help you understand each piece better, but its also really easy to lose yourself in them and forget the actual plot. Of course, having a taste for the dark and/or morbid will also increase your enjoyment of Poe. He is the master of old school horror and I'd much rather read Fall of The House of Usher or Berenice than see what passes for horror these days. Poe creeps you out and builds the suspense instead of using pure shock. If any of this appeals to you and you somehow missed out on reading Poe in school (or just want to revisit his work) this is a great way to go about it.
December 7, 2016
Full disclosure, I only read the poem "Evening Star" and the following short stories: The Fall of the House of Usher, The pit and the Pendulum, William Wilson, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Facts in the Case of M Valdemar, and Hop-Frog.
Norton Anthologies are always solid in my opinion. They don't bog you down with literary criticism, and instead they only help you out when there is a phrase, word, or reference that would be unclear to modern readers. Poe's stories are really fun to read. They took me a while to digest, as I would enjoy myself by mulling over what Poe was getting at by writing these narratives. I think more people should take the time to read Poe, as I found myself feeling smarter and more sophisticated in my thinking for having struggled with him.
Norton Anthologies are always solid in my opinion. They don't bog you down with literary criticism, and instead they only help you out when there is a phrase, word, or reference that would be unclear to modern readers. Poe's stories are really fun to read. They took me a while to digest, as I would enjoy myself by mulling over what Poe was getting at by writing these narratives. I think more people should take the time to read Poe, as I found myself feeling smarter and more sophisticated in my thinking for having struggled with him.
July 8, 2007
Shockingly, I'm giving a Norton Critical Edition only 2 stars. Poe's short stories are fine and the poetry is okay; the critical essays, though, seemed like such a letdown! Some of them were loooooong and boring, and the general organization of some of them (i.e. how they were grouped in the anthology) seemed completely random and scattered. It just wasn't as happy-reading (in other words, me geeking out) or as insightful as most other Norton editions are.
May 24, 2010
Poe is great!
*Rereading stories to write papers for a series of conferences and publications. Being a Poe scholar is more marketable than knowing anything about the 20th C.
**Focusing on "The Gold Bug," "The Man of the Crowd" and "Hop-Frog" primarily.
*Rereading stories to write papers for a series of conferences and publications. Being a Poe scholar is more marketable than knowing anything about the 20th C.
**Focusing on "The Gold Bug," "The Man of the Crowd" and "Hop-Frog" primarily.
November 4, 2009
That's a weird puppy that Poe. I wondered when I was assigned Poe in school what they were thinking giving this stuff to kids. Great writing I guess. Horror never quite was my thing or suspense either, but you've got to hand it to him. He has quite a following.
July 5, 2007
I have read him so often for class and I do not care for all of his work. I like "The Raven."
December 7, 2009
I'm reading one story or poem a day...this is not a book you sit down and read cover to cover. Masque of the Red Death yesterday....still as good as I remember it.
September 14, 2010
It's amazing how much one likes all these stories are after you're out of school and grown.
September 9, 2015
Poe had style. But he's not my style. That's why he gets the 3.
And I am glad we're done wth Poe... until next semester.
And I am glad we're done wth Poe... until next semester.
February 18, 2015
this is on the side burner, Kathleen. but I really really like it.
Read
July 29, 2015love it
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews