Edgar Allan Poe

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.

Edgar Poe was born the son of itinerant actors on January 19th, 1809 in Boston, Massachusets. Abandoned by his father and the later death of his mother, he was taken into the foster care of John Allan, a Virginia tobacco farmer. Now styled as Edgar Allan Poe, he distinguished himself at the University of Virginia but was equally adept at collecting debts from his assiduous gambling. His stepfather’s disapproval shattered their fragile relationship and Poe left home to seek his fortune. In 1836 he married his cousin Virginia but despite his prolific activities - journalism, poetry, lecturing, short stories, publishing, criticism and experimentation with fictional genres, including the detective novel which he virtually invented with the publication of The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) - he received scant recognition for his efforts until the publication of The Raven in 1845. The poem’s instant popularity gave him a new visibility in literary circles, but his personal situation remained desperate: poverty, illness, drink, and the physical decline and ultimate death of Virginia in 1847 led to his untimely and premature decline. In 1849 he was found sick, injured and semi-conscious in a Baltimore tavern. Taken to hospital, he lingered on for four days, but never recovered and on October 7th Edgar Allan Poe died at the age of 40. He was one of the most original writers in the history of American letters - a genius who, thanks to his dire reputation, was tragically misunderstood during his lifetime. It was not until Baudelaire enthusiastically translated his work that he found a wider audience in Europe, and became not only an enormous influence on modern French literature but also on the acclaimed work of writers such as Dostoevsky, Conan Doyle and Jules Verne.

The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings is a collection that displays the full force of Edgar Allan Poe's mastery of both Gothic horror and the short story form. This Penguin Classics edition is edited with an introduction and notes by David Galloway. This selection of Poe's critical writings, short fiction and poetry demonstrates his 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' is a slow-burning Gothic horror, describing 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', 'The Raven' and 'The Cask of Amontillado' explore extreme states of decadence, fear and hate. In his introduction, David Galloway re-examines the myths surrounding Poe's life and reputation. This edition includes a new chronology and suggestions for further reading. As well as his remarkable literary output, Boston-born Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) had a variety of occupations - he served in the US army and was a magazine editor. Towards the end of his life, he was plagued by mental instability. If you enjoyed The Fall of the House of Usher, you might like Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, also available in Penguin Classics.'The most original genius that America has produced'Alfred, Lord Tennyson'Poe has entered our popular consciousness as no other American writer'The New York Times Book Review

A stowaway aboard the whaling ship Grampus, Arthur Gordon Pym finds himself bound on an extraordinary voyage to the high southern latitudes. Poe's remarkable novel recounts the "incredible adventures and discoveries" of Pym and his companions. There is mutiny, appalling butchery, and the "exquisite horror" of cannibalism; premature burial within an impenetrable sea borne labyrinth; a corpse-ridden ghost ship, gigantic polar bears, and uncharted islands peopled by barbarian hordes. It was Poe's unique genius, however, that imbued this Gothic adventure tale with such allegorical richness that readers have been fascinated ever since. In his illuminating introduction and notes to this new edition of Poe's masterpiece, Richard Kopley reveals hidden layers of meaning involving both Poe's family and biblical prophecy.

Hans Phaall, a bankrupt bellows-mender from Rotterdam, thinks up an ingenious scheme to get rid of his creditors and to escape from his dreary existence. He constructs a balloon that will carry him all the way to the moon. On the night of 1st April he tricks his creditors into helping him to inflate the balloon. As soon as the contraption is ready to take off, Hans Phaall gives his creditors the slip and kills them in an explosion. The perilous balloon flight lasts nineteen days and is reported in great detail. When the bellows-mender finally lands on the moon he finds a city inhabited by ugly little people. Hans Phaall pines for a return to his planet and sends one of the moon-dwellers to Rotterdam with a letter for burgomaster Superbus Von Underduk. In that letter Hans Phaall offers information about the moon and its inhabitants in exchange for forgiveness for his crime. The messenger arrives in Rotterdam and causes great excitement and confusion among the level-headed burghers. 'Hans Phaall - A Tale' was first published in 1835, when Edgar Allan Poe was twenty-five years old and virtually unknown. The story was later renamed 'The Unparalleled Adventure of one Hans Pfaall'. Forged with Poe's passion for astronomy and literature it shows influences of such divergent publications as Sir John Herschel's 'A Treatise on Astronomy', Washington Irving's 'Rip Van Winkle' and Rudolph Erich Raspe's 'Singular Travels, Campaigns and Adventures of Baron Munchhausen'. 'Hans Phaall' - much admired by Jules Verne - is an extraordinary tale in which Poe's learning and imagination form a hallucinatory mix of science and fiction. It is looked upon by many as the first true science-fiction story. This edition combines the first version of the tale with several later, revised versions. Included in it is a short essay on 'Pure Imagination' by Edgar Allan Poe, published in 1849, only months before the author died.

America's most influential literary figure worldwide is familiar to most readers of short fiction through only about a dozen stories. This is because many of Poe’s tales depend on knowledge a reader in 1835 or 1845 might have had that a typical reader in 2000 would not. In this extensively annotated and meticulously edited selection of Poe’s short fiction, Stuart Levine and Susan F. Levine connect Poe to major literary forces of his era and to the rapidly changing U. S. of the 1830s and 1840s, discussing Shelley, Carlyle, Byron, Emerson, and Hawthorne, as well as the railroad, photography, and the telegraph. In the process, they reveal a Poe immersed in the America of his day--its politics, science, technology, best-selling books, biases, arts, journalism, fads, scandals, and even sexual mores--and render accessible all thirty-two stories included here. The general Introduction, the headnote to each story, and the annotations included in this volume have been extensively revised from the editors’ critically acclaimed editions of the complete short fiction: The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Edition (1976, 1990).

America's most influential literary figure worldwide is familiar to most readers of short fiction through only about a dozen stories. This is because many of Poe’s tales depend on knowledge a reader in 1835 or 1845 might have had that a typical reader in 2000 would not. In this extensively annotated and meticulously edited selection of Poe’s short fiction, Stuart Levine and Susan F. Levine connect Poe to major literary forces of his era and to the rapidly changing U. S. of the 1830s and 1840s, discussing Shelley, Carlyle, Byron, Emerson, and Hawthorne, as well as the railroad, photography, and the telegraph. In the process, they reveal a Poe immersed in the America of his day--its politics, science, technology, best-selling books, biases, arts, journalism, fads, scandals, and even sexual mores--and render accessible all thirty-two stories included here. The general Introduction, the headnote to each story, and the annotations included in this volume have been extensively revised from the editors’ critically acclaimed editions of the complete short fiction: The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Edition (1976, 1990).

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Nine gripping tales of psychological terror and the supernatural, by the undisputed master of the American Gothic horror story: "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Masque of the Red Death," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Pit and the Pendulum," and 4 others.

Poe found the germ of the story he would develop into ARTHUR GORDON PYM in 1836 in a newspaper account of the shipwreck and subsequent rescue of the two men on board. Published in 1838, this rousing sea adventure follows New England boy, Pym, who stows away on a whaling ship with its captain's son, Augustus. The two boys repeatedly find themselves on the brink of death or discovery and witness many terrifying events, including mutiny, cannibalism, and frantic pursuits. Poe imbued this deliberately popular tale with such allegorical richness, biblical imagery, and psychological insights that the tale has come to influence writers as various as Melville, James, Verne and Nabokov.