But success came too late. Plagued by unrewarding editorial work, Poe was further tormented by the prolonged illness of his wife, who finally succumbed to tuberculosis in 1847. Devastated, Poe seems to have been worn down by his struggles. He courted a number of women, tried without success to found a literary journal, and in 1848 completed Eureka and ‘The Poetic Principle’. Shortly before his planned marriage to a former childhood sweetheart, he collapsed in Baltimore, where he died in October 1849.

DAVID VAN LEER has taught at Cornell and Princeton Universities, and is currently Professor of English and American Literature at University of California, Davis. A regular contributor to The New Republic on American culture from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, he is the author of Emerson’s Epistemology: The Argument of the Essays (1986) and The Queening of America: Gay Culture in Straight Society (1995).

CONTENTS

Introduction

Note on the Text

Select Bibliography

A Chronology of Edgar Allan Poe

SELECTED TALES

MS. Found in a Bottle

Berenicë

Morella

Ligeia

The Man that was Used Up

The Fall of the House of Usher

William Wilson

The Man of the Crowd

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

Eleonora

The Masque of the Red Death

The Pit and the Pendulum

The Mystery of Marie Rogêt

The Tell-Tale Heart

The Gold-Bug

The Black Cat

A Tale of the Ragged Mountains

The Purloined Letter

The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether

The Imp of the Perverse

The Cask of Amontillado

The Domain of Arnheim

Hop-Frog

Von Kempelen and his Discovery

Explanatory Notes

INTRODUCTION

EDGAR ALLAN POE is about as famous as an American writer gets. Children encounter him in elementary school, and his stories about mutilated bodies and walled-up corpses are familiar even to those who never read. He long ago passed into US popular imagination as part of the cultural heritage. Classic horror movies spin off from ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’; every October that inveterate illiterate Bart Simpson retells ‘The Raven’ for his Hallowe’en special; and Poe’s gloomy portrait broods over a Manhattan coffee bar on the spot where he composed the poem.

Yet Poe is a problem to those who study American literature. Fellow writers turn from him in contempt. Late in life, a forgetful Emerson remembered him as the ‘jingle man’. The essayist Paul Elmer More dismissed him as the poet of ‘unripe boys and unsound men’. The novelist Henry James, himself incapable of levity, warned that ‘to take [Poe] with more than a certain degree of seriousness is to lack seriousness one’s self. The anxiety underlying these rejections was best expressed by the expatriate poet T. S. Eliot. Convinced that Poe’s intellect was merely that ‘of a highly gifted young person before puberty’, Eliot quipped that Poe affected no poet except perhaps the limerick-writer Edward Lear. Immediately afterward, however, regretting his harshness, Eliot confessed, ‘And yet one cannot be sure that one’s own writing has not been influenced by Poe.’

It is tempting to dismiss such rejections as simple jealousy, the inevitable fate of those who achieve ‘popular’ success in unprestigious literary genres. Yet most adult readers share these writers’ discomfort. The first real author Americans read, Poe is the one we most wish to outgrow. Acknowledging the appropriateness of the poet Allan Tate’s naming Poe ‘our cousin’, literary scholars still have trouble tracing the bloodlines. Poe finds no place in the literary history of mid-nineteenth-century American Romanticism, but is buried in a footnote, with only glancing allusions to ‘the twins story’ or ‘the one with the cat’. His success with young readers is assumed to signal the immaturity of his work. Like other talents not conforming to traditional literary paradigms—Cooper, Stevenson, and (formerly) Hawthorne, Twain, and the Brontës—Poe is conveniently pigeon-holed as a children’s author, skilful enough but not central to the ‘great tradition’ in American literature.

Much of our difficulty with Poe begins with his distasteful life. Never a good judge of character, Poe had the misfortune to choose as his literary executor and first biographer a man who vilified him as a charlatan and profligate. Although no one continues to credit Griswold’s calumnies, biographers must still admit that Poe’s life was something of a mess. Orphaned at three, Poe never subsequently felt at home anywhere, and spent much of his life searching for a kind of parental approval. His futile attempts to impress his remote foster-father John Allan set the pattern for his lifelong wooings and renunciations of powerful men. His hyperbolic attempts to earn Allan’s love—through academic and military achievement—inevitably ended in disaster.