'In his stories of mystery and imagination Poe created a world-record for the English language: perhaps for all languages.'
—George Bernard Shaw
Read throughout the world, admired by writers as different as Dostoevsky and H.G. Wells, translated by Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe has become a legendary figure, representing the artist as obsessed outcast and romantic failure. His nightmarish visions, shaped by cool artistic calculation, reveal some of the dark possibilities of human experience. But his enormous popularity and his continuing influence on literature depend less on legend or vision than on his stylistic accomplishments as a writer. All of Poe's best-known and most representative works are gathered here, as well as his masterly 'The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.'
Library of America Paperback Classics feature authoritative texts drawn from the acclaimed Library of America series and introduced by today's most distinguished scholars and writers. Each book features a detailed chronology of the author's life and career, and essay on the choice of the text, and notes.
The contents of this Paperback Classic are drawn from Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales, volume number 19 in The Library of America series. It is joined in the series by a companion volume, number 20, Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews.
Edgar Allan Poe's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is a pivotal work in which Poe calls attention to the act of writing and to the problem of representing the truth. It is an archetypal American story of escape from domesticity tracing a young man's rite of passage through a series of terrible brushes with death during a fateful sea voyage. Included are eight related tales which further illuminate Pym by their treatment of persistent themes—fantastic voyages, gigantic whirlpools, and premature burials—as well as its relationship to Poe's art and life.
About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
A classic collection
From the exquisite lyric “To Helen,” to the immortal masterpieces “Annabel Lee,” “The Bells,” and “The Raven,” The Complete Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe demonstrates the author’s gift for the form.
Collected in these two volumes are roe's legendary tales of terror that attest to his stylistic brilliance in evoking an atmosphere of gloom and obsession. Creatures, eyes, coffins, walls-all are symbols in roe's efforts to create an aura of evil. What reader would not share the anxiety of the traveler in The Fall of the House of Usher, who upon his first glimpse of the house, finds an "insufferable gloom pervading my spirit... an utter depression of the soul... an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart"? In volume 2 his nightmarish visions take us down untraveled paths revealing the dark side of the human experience.
This selection of Poe's critical writings, short fiction and poetry demonstrates an intense interest in aesthetic issues and the astonishing power and imagination with which he probed the darkest corners of the human mind. "The Fall of the House of Usher" describes the final hours of a family tormented by tragedy and the legacy of the past. In "The Tell Tale Heart", a murderer's insane delusions threaten to betray him, while stories such as "The Pit and the Pendulum" and "The Cask of Amontillado" explore extreme states of decadence, fear and hate.
A visitor to a gloomy mansion finds a childhood friend dying under the spell of a family curse.
Edgar Allan Poe’s works, with their gothic and often obsessive themes,
have had a significant influence on American literature.
In this Norton Critical Edition, G. R. Thompson has fully introduced, annotated, and edited each text.
“Backgrounds and Contexts” includes fifty-seven carefully chosen documents that illuminate Poe’s prolific but short career, among them reviews, prefaces, and correspondence by Poe as well as thematic pieces dealing with Transcendentalism and alternative romanticism, sciences of the mind, sensation fiction, and the South and slavery.
Fourteen judiciously selected critical essays address Poe’s poetry,
fiction, politics, and psychology. Contributors include Floyd Stovall,
Robert C. McLean, Richard Wilbur, James W. Gargano, Joseph J.
Moldenhauer, Paul John Eakin, Grace Farrell, Liahna Klenman Babener,
Barton Levi St. Armand, Joseph N. Riddel, J. Gerald Kennedy, John Carlos Rowe, Terence Whalen, and John T. Irwin.
A Selected Bibliography is also included.
A fully revised collection of Poe's work
The first new edition of this landmark anthology since 1945 presents a more complicated, perverse, and culturally engaged Poe. Along with the author's familiar masterworks in poetry and fiction, this new Portable Poe includes satirical tales that reflect his critique of American culture.
The classic poems and spine-tingling stories of a Gothic American master collected in one volume.
Of all the American masters, Edgar Allan Poe staked out perhaps the most unique and vivid reputation, as a master of the macabre. Even today, in the age of horror movies and high-tech haunted houses, Poe is the first choice of entertainment for many who want a spine-chilling thrill.
Born in Boston in 1809, and dead at the age of 40, Poe wrote across several fields during his life, noted for his poetry and short stories as well as his criticism. The best of each of these is collected here, including the classic poem The Raven, and timeless stories like The Tell-Tale Heart. In his introduction to this volume, G. R. Thompson argues that Poe was a great satirist and comedic craftsman, as well as a formidable Gothic writer. "All of Poe's fiction," Thompson writes, "and the poems as well, can be seen as one coherent piece—as the work of one of the greatest ironists of world literature."
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" versions.
The stories collected in volume 1 include "Ms. Found in a Bottle," "Ligeia," "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and "The Fall of the House of Usher." Volume 2 includes "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Purloined Letter," and "The Cask of Amontillado."
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."
About the Authors:
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), preeminent American writer and literary critic, exerted a worldwide influence on literature through his short fiction and his theoretical statements on poetry and the short story.
Thomas Ollive Mabbott, a faculty member of Hunter College, New York, for nearly forty years, worked on Poe's writings from the 1920s until his death in 1968.
A new selection for the NEA’s Big Read program
A compact selection of Poe’s greatest stories and poems, chosen by the National Endowment for the Arts for their Big Read program.
This selection of eleven stories and seven poems contains such famously chilling masterpieces of the storyteller’s art as “The Tell-tale Heart,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and such unforgettable poems as “The Raven,” “The Bells,” and “Annabel Lee.” Poe is widely credited with pioneering the detective story, represented here by “The Purloined Letter,” “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”
Also included is his essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” in which he lays out his theory of how good writers write, describing how he constructed “The Raven” as an example.
A chilling compilation of some of Edgar Allen Poe's best-loved stories, edited by Vincent Price and Chandler Brossard and with an introduction by Vincent Price, including:
The Black Cat - The Fall of the House of Usher - The Masque of the Red Death - The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar - The Premature Burial - Ms. Found in a Bottle - A Tale of the Ragged Mountains - The Sphinx - The Murders in the Rue Morgue - The Tell-Tale Heart - The Gold-Bug - The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether - The Man That Was Used Up - The Balloon Hoax - A Descent Into the Maelstrom - The Purloined Letter - The Pit and The Pendulum - The Cask of Amontillado
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