Complete Works, Vol 14

by Edgar Allan Poe

1 Akron, Ohio, The Werner company Publication 1908 This is an OCR reprint. There may be numerous typos or missing text. There are no illustrations or indexes. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. You can also preview the book there.

Hardcover

Published December 1, 1960

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

[Kevin Beary · Rating 4 out of 5]

I`ve read 75% of this book. I love the way he wrote.
I never was a fan of poetry but I like his. I don`t read mystery but I like his. I don`t watch horror films nor do I read scary books (notice the lack of stephen king and dean koontz on my lists) but Poes horror stories are so cool. I`m not a big fan of short stories , but I love Poe.
I like Poe because he has changed my mind in so many ways.
I used Poe as a great launching pad to read other classic writers , the difference in prose between these writers and the typical fiction writer of today (forced to dumb it down for the public) is staggering.

[Lexi Snow]

I absolutely loved this book and like the way that he wrote like all of the short stories and stuff!! It isn't what you would expect most people to read because some of it is gory, but I loved it!! It was a very good book!! Not only did it show like some of the love and hatred in those times, but it also showed that you can actually understand what was going on in those times!!

[Evalyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't read from cover to cover but I enjoyed the biographical info on Poe and especially enjoyed reading "The Raven" again.