The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe Read Online
The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
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The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston in 1809, the son of itinerant actors. Both his parents died within two years of his birth. Edgar was taken into the home of a Richmond merchant, John Allan, although he was never legally adopted. Poe’s relationship with his foster-father was not good and was further strained when he was forced to withdraw from the University of Virginia because Allan refused to finance him. After a reconciliation, Poe entered the Military Academy at West Point in 1830; he was dishonourably discharged in January 1831. It was a deliberate action on Poe’s part and again was largely due to Allan’s tight-fistedness. His early work as a writer went unrecognized and he was forced to earn his living on newspapers, working as an editor in Richmond, Philadelphia and New York. He achieved respect as a literary critic but it was not until the publication of The Raven and Other Poems in 1845 that he gained success as a writer. And, despite his increasing fame, Poe remained in the same poverty which characterized most of his life. In 1836 he married his cousin, Virginia, who was then fourteen; she died eleven years later of tuberculosis.
Poe’s life and personality have attracted almost as much attention as his writing, and he has been variously pictured as a sado-masochist, dipsomaniac, drug addict and manic depressive. There can be little doubt that Poe was a disturbed and tormented man, and like so many of his characters, often driven to the brink of madness. Writing of the effect of Virginia’s death, Poe said: ‘I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity. During these fits of absolute unconsciousness, I drank… my enemies referred the insanity to the drink, rather than the drink to the insanity.’ Poe died a few years later in 1849 and was buried in Baltimore beside his wife.
There have been strongly divergent evaluations of Poe’s literary significance, from Emerson’s dismissal of him as ‘the jingle man’ to Yeats’s declaration, ‘always and for all lands a great lyric poet’. David Galloway, in his Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Poe’s Selected Works, writes: ‘Even those tales and poems which seem to depend almost entirely on the conventional devices of horror… represent a profound disruption of man’s mind and soul, a spiritual agony which transcends the age in which it was written, as well as the agonized life which created it.’
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This edition first published as a Modern Library Edition by
Random House, Inc., New York 1938
Published in Penguin Books 1982
This edition published by arrangement with Random House, Inc.
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Copyright renewed © Random House, Inc., 1965
All rights reserved
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-194208-7
CONTENTS
1. The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall
4. Von Kempelen and His Discovery
6. The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
7. The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade
9. A Descent into the Maelström
10. The Murders in the Rue Morgue
11. The Mystery of Marie Roget
14. The Fall of the House of Usher
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