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The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe.
1026 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1938
5 people are currently reading
4 people want to read
About the author
Edgar Allan Poe
9,941 books28.9k followersThe name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, and The Fall of the House of Usher. This versatile writer’s oeuvre includes short stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a book of scientific theory, and hundreds of essays and book reviews. He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the science fiction genre, but he made his living as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. Poe’s reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry.
Just as the bizarre characters in Poe’s stories have captured the public imagination so too has Poe himself. He is seen as a morbid, mysterious figure lurking in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or crumbling castles. This is the Poe of legend. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame the author’s name.
The real Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston on January 19, 1809. Edgar was the second of three children. His other brother William Henry Leonard Poe would also become a poet before his early death, and Poe’s sister Rosalie Poe would grow up to teach penmanship at a Richmond girls’ school. Within three years of Poe’s birth both of his parents had died, and he was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia while Poe’s siblings went to live with other families. Mr. Allan would rear Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe had dreams of being a writer in emulation of his childhood hero the British poet Lord Byron. Early poetic verses found written in a young Poe’s handwriting on the backs of Allan’s ledger sheets reveal how little interest Poe had in the tobacco business.
For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_al...
Just as the bizarre characters in Poe’s stories have captured the public imagination so too has Poe himself. He is seen as a morbid, mysterious figure lurking in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or crumbling castles. This is the Poe of legend. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame the author’s name.
The real Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston on January 19, 1809. Edgar was the second of three children. His other brother William Henry Leonard Poe would also become a poet before his early death, and Poe’s sister Rosalie Poe would grow up to teach penmanship at a Richmond girls’ school. Within three years of Poe’s birth both of his parents had died, and he was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia while Poe’s siblings went to live with other families. Mr. Allan would rear Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe had dreams of being a writer in emulation of his childhood hero the British poet Lord Byron. Early poetic verses found written in a young Poe’s handwriting on the backs of Allan’s ledger sheets reveal how little interest Poe had in the tobacco business.
For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_al...
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July 28, 2025
Yes, I have read most of (a lot of) these tales and poems long ago when I was a college student, and at various times since, but not very recently until I read A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe by Mark Dawidziak and decided I needed to reread some of Poe's works to refresh my mind of items in this biography. The two poems I most love, The Raven and The Bells, I read several times as well as many others. My rereading of the Tales was not nearly as complete. Since Poe is the "father" of the detective story which has become so popular today, I, of course, wanted to visit Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin so I reread The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Purloined Letter. Not quite as much to my liking, Stephen King and others have also made stories of terror popular today so I also read The Black Cat, The Masque of the Red Death, The Cask of Amontillado, The Tell-Tale heart, Ligeia and some others.
I probably should have read The Gold Bug since I remember it as one of my favorites, but I didn't. Maybe I will go do that now. It has been a fine reunion .
I probably should have read The Gold Bug since I remember it as one of my favorites, but I didn't. Maybe I will go do that now. It has been a fine reunion .
Displaying 1 of 1 review