Tales and Sketches - 1831-1842

by Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Editor)

POE’s tales are his chief contribution to the literature of the world, and his better tales are known and read in every major language. Here is the collection edited by Thomas Ollive Mabbott, for more than a generation recognized as the outstanding Poe scholar in America.

Mr. Mabbott tells the origin of each tale, its sources, and publication history; mentions some significant critical opinions; and explains Poe’s references and allusions. The texts given are Poe’s final versions, incorporating manuscript changes made by the author after publication. All authorized texts have been collated, including more than fifty, mostly manuscripts and early printings, not available to earlier editors. The record of verbal variants and the chronological arrangement of the volume permit readers to see the development of Poe’s style, methods, and ideas. Both volumes were completed before Mr. Mabbott’s death; Eleanor D. Kewer and Maureen C. Mabbott have prepared his manuscripts for the printer, filling gaps left and tracking down clues in Mr. Mabbott’s notes.

Tales and Sketches carry forward the Mabbott edition of Poe, whose first volume — Poems — was hailed as a monumental accomplishment.

Genres: Short Stories

1432 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1978

About the author

The 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...

Reviews

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Soon after I pledged to pursue all writings gothic and ghostly, I decided that one of my early tasks must be to read (or re-read) all the short tales of Poe, including every essay or ephemeral journal-piece that contains even a nugget of narrative. Now, thanks to the assistance of Mabbott's excellent edition, I am well on my way toward accomplishing this task, since Mabbot's comprehensive collection of stories includes every one of Poe's short works with the germ of a story or the scrap of a plot. Now, with the completion of this first volume of tales, I have read all of Poe's short narrative pieces composed between 1831 to 1842. (Those written between 1831 and 1839 I have already commented upon in my reviews of "Tales Grotesque and Arabesque").

Most of the best tales from this period are the well known ones which I first read forty or fifty years ago. I cannot say that I have here discovered--or rediscovered--any neglected gems that shine with the brightness of "Usher" or "Ligeia," but I have found a few that deserve to be in their company ("A Man of the Crowd," "The Oval Portrait")and more than a few charming, lesser works.

I was impressed by the sunny and forthright style Poet adopts in his humorous pieces, such as "Never Bet the Devil Your Head" and "A Succession of Sundays." I admired and enjoyed the aesthete in Poe, for the way his detailed description of the homely art of interior decoration (in "The Philosophy of Furniture") as well as the larger canvas of landscape ("The Landscape Garden") seem to look forward to the decadents of the fin de siecle. (Indeed, Poe excels in descriptions of every kind, including a marvelously detailed account of how a black cat opens a latched door in "Instinct vs Reason.") I was also struck by how the element of description shapes much of the content of his shorter tales ("The Island of the Fay," "The Colloquy of Monos and Una," "Eleonora," "The Masque of the Red Death"), creating something very much like a prose poem.

All in all, I now have a new appreciation for the breadth and humanity of Poe, his unrelenting curiosity and his considerable artistic and intellectual range.