Tales & Sketches - Volume 2: 1843-1849

by Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Editor)

Esteemed as a literary critic and poet, Edgar Allan Poe was most highly acclaimed for his tales and sketches. He transformed the short story from anecdote to art, virtually created the detective story, and perfected the psychological thriller. This volume is the second of two, edited by the consummate Poe scholar Thomas Ollive Mabbott, collecting all the tales of this master of the uncanny, the unnerving, and the terrifying.
 
Poe's stories reflect his professed method of "writing as if the author were firmly impressed with the truth, yet astonished at the immensity of the wonders he related." Marrying grotesque inventiveness with superb plot construction, Poe's strikingly original tales often use only one main character and one main incident. In many of them, horror and suspense, revenge and torture, are laced with hilarious satire. Each volume is enriched with Mabbott's detailed and authoritative notes on sources, the history and collation of all known texts authorized by Poe, and variants of Poe's "final" version.
 
Volume 2 contains stories written between 1843 and Poe's death, including "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Purloined Letter," and "The Cask of Amontillado."
 
Promising spine-tingling delights and sleepless nights, this annotated edition of Tales and Sketches is a treasure trove for scholars and general readers alike, confirming Poe's status as one of literary art's "most brilliant but erratic stars."
 
 
 

760 pages, Paperback

Published August 31, 2000

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]

Now that I have completed the second volume of Poe's Tales and Sketches (which contains all of Poe's short narratives from 1843 to 1849), I have a richer, more nuanced appreciation of his body of work.

There is so much more to Poe than the dozen and a half commonly anthologized stories. which, if taken as representative, create an unduly eccentric and morbid conception of both the writer and the man. These pieces exhibit a Poe who is, above all else, overwrought: overwrought in style ("Usher", "Pit and the Pendulum"), overwrought in emotional intensity ("Ligeia,""The Tell Tale Heart"), and overwrought in grotesque effects ("Zenobia", "Xing a Paragrab"). Moreover, it becomes easy for the reader to psychologize the literary personality of the man who could produced such overwrought pieces, viewing him as a hothouse flower like Swinburne or Dowson, rather than as a bustling professional writer who--whatever may be his temperamental or constitutional flaws--commanded a range of writing styles and a variety of attitudes and moods.

Having now read all the short narrative pieces, I am particularly struck by how many of these narratives are presented in a plain, easy and almost modern style ("Thou Art the Man" "Hopfrog"), less ornate and Latinate than his fellow Dark Romantics Hawthorne and Melville, let alone his polysyllabic disciples Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. Also, the tone of many of the pieces included here is one of clinical coldness, the opposite of emotional intensity ("Marie Roget", "The Man of the Crowd"), and the grotesque effects, whether horrific or comic, are often subtle ("The Oblong Box," "The Spectacles").

Neither Poe nor his work is easily classifiable. Having now read the "colloquies" as well as his pieces on premature burial and mesmerism, I realize that Poe believed that life, both human and cosmic, is composed of shades and gradations, that consciousness/dissolution, life/death, and spirit/matter might--if we had the instruments to observe them precisely--reveal themselves to be stages of the same incremental process, not actual dichotomies at all. Perhaps we should attempt to see Poe's works as he saw the universe, following each progression and retrogression, observing every alteration in degree and form, seeing each as part of a rich, comprehensive whole.

[Leah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not a big fan of poetry, so I have to say I enjoy his short stories more. My absolute favorite, and probably one of the scariest things I've ever read, is "The Pit and the Pendulum." And, of course, there's "The Telltale Heart", "The Cask of Amontillado", and "The Fall of the House of Usher." These are quick, easy reads that are well worth it.