Edgar Allan Poe

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.

Renowned as the creator of the detective story and a master of horror, the author of "The Red Mask of Death," "The Black Cat," and "The Murders of the Rue Morgue," Edgar Allan Poe seems to have derived his success from suffering and to have suffered from his success. "The Raven" and "The Tell-Tale Heart" have been read as signs of his personal obsessions, and "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Descent into the Maelstrom" as symptoms of his own mental collapse. Biographers have seldom resisted the opportunities to confuse the pathologies in the stories with the events in Poe's life. Against this tide of fancy, guesses, and amateur psychologizing, Arthur Hobson Quinn's biography devotes itself meticulously to facts. Based on exhaustive research in the Poe family archive, Quinn extracts the life from the legend, and describes how they both were distorted by prior biographies. "

Winner of the 2015 Edgar Award for Best Critical/Biographical! Follow the footsteps of the father of American horror fiction. Edgar Allan Poe was an oddity: his life, literature, and legacy are all, well, odd. In Poe-Land, J. W. Ocker explores the physical aspects of Poe’s legacy across the East Coast and beyond, touring Poe’s homes, examining artifacts from his life—locks of his hair, pieces of his coffin, original manuscripts, his boyhood bed—and visiting the many memorials dedicated to him. Along the way, Ocker meets people from a range of backgrounds and professions—actors, museum managers, collectors, historians—who have dedicated some part of their lives to Poe and his legacy. Poe-Land is a unique travelogue of the afterlife of the poet who invented detective fiction, advanced the emerging genre of science fiction, and elevated the horror genre with a mastery over the macabre that is arguably still unrivaled today.

In "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains", Edgar Allan Poe tells the story of Augustus Bedloe, who, during a walk in the Ragged Mountains, experiences a series of supernatural events and a visible temporal overlap, culminating in an intriguing revelation about his own identity and destiny.

Gathers Poe's essays on the theory of poetry, the art of fiction, the role of the critic, leading nineteenth-century writers, and the New York literary world.

The Edgar Allan Poe Collection (2020) compiles several iconic works of short fiction and poetry by an icon of American literature. Recognized as a foundational figure of nineteenth century fiction, Poe has inspired generations of readers and writers with his craftsmanship and taste for tragedy and terror. His brief but meteoric career shaped the trajectory of American literature forever, forming a legacy without which science fiction, horror, and detective writing would surely be shells of themselves. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” a man receives a distressing letter from an old friend requesting his presence at his family estate. There, Roderick Usher and his twin sister Madeline are found suffering from an unknown illness, and the narrator struggles to comfort them as signs of paranormal activity lead him to believe that the house itself is a living entity. “The Masque of the Red Death” is a timely work of Gothic fiction set in the abbey of a powerful prince. As the world outside suffers from a deadly plague, the prince decides to hold a masquerade for his wealthy friends and fellow nobles, unwittingly bringing death to his own fortunate doorstep. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” a French detective summons the powers of analytical reasoning to investigate the deaths of two young women. Included in this collection are some of Poe’s most iconic poems, including “A Dream Within a Dream,” “The Raven,” and “Ulalume,” all of which remain indelible classics of Romantic verse, masterpieces of mystery, beauty, and slow-burning fear. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of The Edgar Allan Poe Collection is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.

Tamerlane and Other Poems is the first published work by American writer Edgar Allan Poe. The short collection of poems was first published in 1827. Today, it is believed only 12 of approximately 50 copies of the collection still exist. The poems were largely inspired by Lord Byron, including the long title poem "Tamerlane", which depicts a historical conqueror who laments the loss of his first romance. Like much of Poe's future work, the poems in Tamerlane and Other Poems include themes of love, death, and pride.