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Exploring the 10 Most Famous Works of Edgar Allan Poe

most famous short stories by edgar allan poe

Mathew Benjamin Brady , Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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1. “ the raven “.

most famous short stories by edgar allan poe

Unknown authorUnknown author; Restored by Yann Forget and Adam Cuerden , Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

2. “ The Tell-Tale Heart “

3. “ the fall of the house of usher “.

most famous short stories by edgar allan poe

4. “ The Masque of the Red Death “

5. “ the pit and the pendulum “.

most famous short stories by edgar allan poe

6. “ Annabel Lee “

7. “ the cask of amontillado “.

most famous short stories by edgar allan poe

Edgar Allan Poe Memorial Association , Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

8. “ The Black Cat “

9. “ ligeia”.

most famous short stories by edgar allan poe

10. “ The Murders in the Rue Morgue”

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Ranking The 10 Best Edgar Allan Poe Stories

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Grace Lapointe

Grace Lapointe’s fiction has been published in Kaleidoscope, Deaf Poets Society, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, and is forthcoming in Corporeal Lit Mag. Her essays and poetry have been published in Wordgathering. Her stories and essays—including ones that she wrote as a college student—have been taught in college courses and cited in books and dissertations. More of her work is at https://gracelapointe.wordpress.com, Medium, and Ao3.

View All posts by Grace Lapointe

Edgar Allan Poe was one of the all-time most inventive and versatile authors in American literature. He was also one of the first U.S. writers to support himself through his writing. Born Edgar Poe in Boston in 1809, after his father left his family and his mother died, he was raised mainly in Richmond, Virginia, by the Allan family. He died in Baltimore in 1849 at age 40 from causes that are still unclear.

Poe’s stories convey in a few pages what some writers take hundreds of pages to tell. They contain wordplay and symbolism but also anticipate more realistic writers like Fyodor Dostoevsky. Before the formal field of psychology existed, Poe’s stories explored guilt, paranoia, delusions, and obsessions. Poe helped create the overlapping moods and genres of horror, mystery, historical fiction, slipstream, and science fiction and fantasy as we know them today.

Known mainly as a literary critic in his lifetime, Poe worked for several literary journals. Unlike many other 19 th century writers, Poe thought that fiction should never be didactic or moralizing. His theory and fiction helped define the short story as a form.

You can buy Poe’s Short Stories at bookstores, and most are available to read for free online at Project Gutenberg and other sites.

Sources disagree on how many works of fiction Poe wrote, although most estimate it was at least 70 or 80. For January 19, 2022, the 213 th anniversary of his birth, here is a ranking of ten of his best stories.

The Top 10 Poe Stories, Ranked

The Telltale Heart cover

1. “The Tell-Tale Heart”

One of his shortest stories, this is the quintessential Poe story in many ways. It concisely showcases his recurring elements of guilt, paranoia, murder, and unnamed narrators rationalizing their actions. The murdered man’s heart beating through the floorboards is one of Poe’s creepiest, most iconic images, blurring the line between psychological and supernatural horror.

The Cask of Amontillado cover

2. “The Cask of Amontillado”

The protagonist, Montressor, lures his acquaintance, Fortunato, into a wine cellar that’s actually a crypt. He then walls him up and leaves him inside to die. Montressor is one of Poe’s most terrifying and unreliable narrators. We never even learn “the thousand injuries” or final “insult” that Fortunato committed against Montressor in the first place. Poe’s grim sense of humor is underrated, but his characters often have ironic names. Fortunato means fortunate in Italian.

The Fall of the House of Usher cover

3. “The Fall of the House of Usher”

Dr. Oliver Tearle described this story as a gothic novel condensed into a short story. It contains many hallmarks of gothic literature from before and after Poe: decay, aristocracy, and an old house with family secrets, including incest. Guillermo del Toro’s horror film Crimson Peak and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s novel Mexican Gothic are excellent recent takes on gothic fiction that share some key elements with this story.

The Pit and the Pendulum cover

4. “The Pit and the Pendulum”

This story makes its suspense and danger seem immediate to both the narrator and readers. During the Inquisition in Europe centuries earlier, the unnamed narrator is trapped in a cell between two equally perilous forms of torture: the pit and the scythe-like, swinging pendulum blade. Its nightmarish imagery takes old cliches like being stuck in a crucible, or between a rock and a hard place, and realizes them, both literally and metaphorically.

The Masque of Red Death cover

5. The Masque of the Red Death

During a highly contagious epidemic, the Red Death, callous, creative Prince Prospero and his friends throw a lavish masquerade ball. They seem oblivious to the danger and their own privilege — and then the Red Death personified shows up. Today, people either return to this story or find it too on-the-nose during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue cover

6. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”

There’s debate as to whether Poe’s character Auguste Dupin was the first fictional detective . While Poe may not have coined the word “detective,” he influenced the entire mystery genre, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes . Dupin later appeared in two more Poe stories: “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” and “The Purloined Letter.” With Dupin, Poe established many conventions of detective stories. These include a private investigator, independent from the police department, who uses logical reasoning to solve crimes.

The Oval Portrait cover

7. The Oval Portrait

A painter draws his wife’s life force into a portrait of her, killing her. This eerie story plays on ancient myths of mirrors and paintings capturing the subjects’ souls. Some critics consider this story a possible influence on Oscar Wilde’s Victorian novel The Picture of Dorian Gray .

The Premature Burial cover

8. “The Premature Burial”

The narrator has a phobia of being buried alive, and he describes supposedly true examples of this phenomenon. In the early 1800s, this would have been a reasonable fear, as it was theoretically possible and occasionally happened. Poe used different takes on live burial in other stories, including “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Cask of Amontillado.”

The Man of the Crowd cover

9. “The Man of the Crowd”

An anonymous observer in a crowd becomes fascinated with a stranger and follows him. This short story is often taught alongside poet Charles Baudelaire’s description of a flâneur or idler. As always, Poe’s ability to create suspense and his knowledge of history, Greek, and French make the story memorable. Both Poe and Baudelaire described writers as avid observers of life.

The Black Cat cover

10. “The Black Cat”

Often paired with “The Tell-Tale Heart,” this story features another unnamed, unreliable, and violent narrator. He escalates from animal abuse to murder and is literally and figuratively haunted by his actions. As usual with Poe, the ambiguity makes it even creepier. We’re unsure whether anything supernatural occurs or if we can believe anything the narrator says.

Other Works

Edgar Allan Poe began writing poetry as a teenager , and his poems are just as fascinating and enduring as his stories. His most famous poems include The Raven , Annabel Lee , and “Lenore.” His critical theory includes “The Poetic Principle,” published posthumously and compiles several of his literary theory lectures.

Poe’s influence is everywhere in 20th and 21st century fiction, from Modernism to the twist endings of The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror . Horror movies with victims trapped in torture chambers are influenced by “The Pit and the Pendulum.” The modern thriller, particularly ones with confessions or narration by murderers, are also influenced by Poe’s stories. In 2019, Book Riot published a list of some examples of Poe references in pop culture, including The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror. In House of Salt and Sorrows , a 2019 YA gothic horror novel and fairytale retelling by Erin A. Craig, several character names reference Poe and his characters.

Can’t get enough of Poe’s stories and poems? Check out these songs inspired by Edgar Allan Poe and His Hideous Heart , a YA anthology of Poe retellings edited by Dahlia Adler.

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Edgar Allan Poe’s 10 Best Stories

Edgar Allan Poe endures as an artist who made his life's work a deeper than healthy dive into the messy engine of human foibles, obsessions, and misdeeds.

If Edgar Allan Poe — and his writing — has not aged well and seems more than a little passé for 21st century sensibilities, it’s not entirely his fault. Like others who have done things first, and best, it’s likely we grow more impatient with their imitations than the original.

In any event, Poe was a pioneer in almost too many ways to count. If his work and his life (and most especially his death) seem clichéd, dying young, debauched and with too little money was not yet the career move it would eventually become for other artists. With vices and an intensity that would give even a young Charles Bukowski pause, and would have buried the punk rock poseur Sid Vicious, Poe managed to be for literature what Miles Davis was for jazz: he didn’t merely set new standards, he changed the course of subsequent art, perfecting entirely new paradigms in the process.

Some might claim Poe gets too much credit for perfecting (if not inventing) the American short horror story and detective story. The fact is, he doesn’t get enough.

Perhaps the best way to gain historical perspective on the proper scope of Poe’s achievements and influence is to consider an abbreviated list of legends who stood on his doleful shoulders: French poet Charles Baudelaire (who both championed and translated Poe), H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson, Herman Melville, Arthur Conan Doyle, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and a trio of tolerably impressive non-Americans: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Oscar Wilde and Sigmund Freud. Suffice it to say, if your work has any part in shaping or inspiring authors who make significant contributions to the canon, your status is more than secure.

Arguably, no American figure has influenced as many brilliant — and imitated — writers as Poe. The entire genres of horror, science fiction and detective story might be quite different, and not for the better, without Poe’s example. More, his insights into psychology, both as narrative device and metaphysical exercise, are considerable; he was describing behavior and phenomena that would become the stuff of textbooks several decades after his death.

He also happened to be a first rate critic, and his insights are as astute and insightful as anything being offered in the mid-19th Century (his essay “The Poetic Principle” comes as close to a “how to” manual for aspiring writers as Orwell’s justly celebrated “Politics and the English Language”). Oh, and he was a pretty good poet, too.

When assessing Poe, 150-plus years after he died, it’s imperative to interrogate and untangle that fact that not all clichés are created equally. Or, put another way, we must remember that before certain things became clichés, they were unarticulated concerns and compulsions.

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When we talk about old school we typically call to mind an era that was pre-TV and even pre-movie. Well, Poe was writing in an era that was pre- radio and practically pre-daguerreotype. With no Snopes or MythBusters, encyclopedias not readily available and religion the common if inconsistent arbiter of moral guidance, Poe was not after cheap frights so much as uncovering the collective unconscious. Put more plainly, this was a time when being accidentally buried alive was something that could conceivably occur.

The reason Poe remains so convincing and unsettling is because he doesn’t rely on goblins or scenarios that oblige the suspension of belief; he is himself the madman, the stalker, the outcast, the detective and, above all, the artist who made his life’s work a deeper than healthy dive into the messy engine of human foibles, obsessions and misdeeds. He stands alone, still, at the top of a darkened lighthouse, unable to promise a happy ending and half-insane from what he’s seen.

Here we celebrate Poe’s ten greatest tales, but first, a brief sample of tales that don’t quite make the cut, but warrant attention and approbation.

First and foremost, the almost unclassifiable (and Poe’s only novel-length work) “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket”. Jorge Luis Borges loved it, Jules Verne was undoubtedly influenced and without this model, we may not have gotten our great (white) American novel. If it’s good enough for Melville, it’s good enough for everyone.

“Berenice” and “Eleonora”, two character studies of doomed women, both epitomizing some of Poe’s most persistent fixations (teeth, premature burial). There’s also the whole “cousin thing”.

The type of story O. Henry would make a career of, “The Oval Portrait” is an early “shocker” even though contemporary audiences will see the conclusion coming a mile away. Like “Pym”, this one makes the cut if only for the eventual masterpiece it influenced, in this case Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray .

It might be a stretch to say that “Hop-Frog” presaged all the slasher dramas of the ’70s and ’80s, but it’s definitely a quite satisfying prototype of the abused outcast getting his revenge, equal parts Michael Myers and (Black Sabbath’s) Iron Man –with grating teeth.

Finally, “A Descent into the Maelström” is rightly credited as being an early attempt at a proper science fiction study, and the technique of an older, wiser sailor recounting his tale as narrative is an obvious antecedent to Conrad.

10. “The Gold Bug”

You almost have to transport yourself back to a time without electricity to fully appreciate Poe’s achievement here. In terms of influence, Robert Louis Stevenson merrily declared he “broke into the gallery of Mr. Poe” (for the creation of Treasure Island ), and the bug bite instigating heightened awareness anticipates both “Spiderman” and “The Fly”. The extensive use of ciphers — cryptography being a big fad of the time — also may have inspired Zodiac (the killer and the subsequent movie). Even the appallingly dated dialect of Jupiter is a prelude for the cruder moments of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn .

The sheer effort of imagination alone in seeing this one through requires that it be regarded as an important work.

9. “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”

Another one that must be properly appraised as a product of its time, the fact is that, upon publication, this tale caused a public uproar because it was sufficiently believable. This tale employs the ostensibly scientific case study of a hypnotized patient who, in his mesmerized state, is able to exist in a surreal, inexplicable condition where he’s dead but… still alive. Once again, as preposterous as this sounds, today, and as outlandish as it clearly was, even in 1845, it’s a credit to Poe’s masterful description, pacing and use of suspense that he actually pulled it off.

8. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”

Celebrated as the first modern detective story, Poe’s hero C. Auguste Dupin is featured in two subsequent tales, “The Mystery of Marie Roget” and “The Purloined Letter”, but “Rue Morgue” is the most famous, and best of the three. One of the many Poe efforts made into an inferior, and terribly dated, film, it works best on the page. Using his powers of deliberation, Dupin is an undeniable model for Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Poe is in full command of his considerable powers here, employing the process of investigation and discovery, cleverly employed humor and terror, and a character who proves he’s smarter than everyone else.

7. “William Wilson”

It seems impossible to prove that Dostoyevsky was directly influenced by Poe, but it’s difficult to believe early novel The Double was not in some way informed by this compact tale that manages to invoke class, the concept of the doppelgänger, split-personality and the self-corrective of one’s conscience (all themes Dostoyevsky would make his calling card, culminating in his masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov ).

In only a handful of other stories was Poe so deftly able to balance shock and humor, albeit of a very dark variety. Cognizant that the narrator is a scoundrel, it’s difficult to pity his plight even as we shudder at the humiliation he suffers. Although not often described as such, “William Wilson” is a tour de force psychological case study of an unreliable narrator tortured by a deservedly conflicted sense of self.

6. “The Pit and the Pendulum”

Darkness. Torture. Rats. Any questions? How about a slowly descending, foot-long razor ever-so-slowly descending from the ceiling, giving you plenty of time to think about how it will eventually (and ever-so-slowly) slice open down the middle? And that’s just a basic summary.

Here is a one of Poe’s most fully realized attempts at “totality”. Poe creates a complete atmosphere of terror, where the narrator and reader understands it’s not random, his captors are very aware of the conditions they’ve created, making the tension difficult to endure. Where other stories describe, in often excruciating detail, the anguish inflicted on an overly sensitive individual, in this one Poe makes the reader acutely aware of their own senses: unable to see inside the pit, smelling the rats as they gnaw at the ropes, hearing the deliberate hiss of the pendulum, feeling the sweat frozen by the fear of death.

5. “The Tell-Tale Heart”

Another one that’s easy to imagine Dostoyevsky studying, this time in the construction of his underground man ( Notes from Underground ): an unreliable narrator, or a narrator so reliable – -and truthful — that he indicts himself in the attempt to be understood, and pitied. As a study of horror, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, perhaps Poe’s most (in)famous story, seems tame to contemporary audiences. But as an examination of obsession and psychosis?

An amazingly compressed rendering of a pathology pushed to irrational extremes, Poe laid the groundwork for everyone from Fantômas to Norman Bates. The real fear an adult can derive from this story is not the narrator’s brutality or even innocence, but his insistence that he’s sane.

With understated irony, Poe decodes the self-deceived stratagem of our most dangerous sociopaths.

4. “The Masque of the Red Death”

Although if only considered an unrivaled allegory of death (and its inevitability), that somewhat superficial analysis still sells this one short as a blistering critique of social stratification. Here Poe uses a rampant disease to illustrate not only the behaviors but attitudes of the haves toward the have-nots: actively walling themselves inside a fortified castle while misery wipes out the countryside, the superbly named Prince Prospero and his court can’t be bothered with empathy for the afflicted, they have lavish masquerade balls to attend.

A masterful clinic of the Gothic aesthetic ensues as different-colored rooms are described, the air of revelry undercut with hourly reminders of mortality, courtesy of the ebony clock. Finally, there’s the spectacle of a silent intruder who mockingly moves from room to room, until finally confronted by the unfortunate prince.

And then, comeuppance courtesy of one of the great closing lines in literary history: “And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”

3. “The Black Cat”

Self-loathing? Poe, at times, makes the Grunge and Goth movements look like an ecstasy-addled rave. His irredeemable spiritual desolation was rooted not in anything like the info-overload pressure of too many choices we confront today, or finding the perfect partner or job, but fear of poverty, hunger and the unremarkable ailments that preyed upon humanity for so many centuries before sufficient medical advancements were made. He lived in a time when even libraries might not have the information you needed, so you wrote it down or took to sea or went insane as a matter of principle.

In “The Black Cat”, when the narrator’s abuse of the bottle becomes unmanageable, it seems not autobiographical so much as an expression of the author’s greatest fear: that his appetite for alcohol would poison his personality and override his ability to create. It’s also Poe’s first extended interrogation of PERVERSENESS (all caps here, just like the story), which is described as an “unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself — to offer violence to its own nature.” The image of the corrupted narrator, hanging his beloved cat with tears streaming down his cheeks, remains among the most pitiful, and genuinely haunting images in the Poe catalog.

Once more, it’s tantalizing to contemplate the ways Dostoyevsky may well have been developing the possibilities of an irresistible perversity driving one to self-defeat (which Poe himself expanded upon in “The Imp of the Perverse”) in both The Double and Crime and Punishment . “The Black Cat”, while quite successful as a spooky tale with an outrageous ending, presents Poe the psychologist at his most incisive — and unsettling.

2. “The Fall of the House of Usher”

If “The Masque of the Red Death” features one of the all-time great closing lines, “The Fall of the House of Usher” contains one of the most sublime opening passages: in one extended paragraph containing 417 words, Poe provides an enduring showcase for his “unity of effect” theory. Practically every image, every action, every word is dedicated toward the invocation of dread, and the suspense careens toward a conclusion that is literally shattering (in several senses of the word).

The tale concerns itself with the narrator and his childhood friend, Roderick Usher, as well as his twin sister Madeline. And yet the main character is the house itself. The narrator feels a palpable sense of dreariness and decay as he approaches the family mansion, a foreboding that comes full circle as the house collapses into itself in the final scene.

It’s the effect the house has on its tenants, however, where Poe couples supernatural suspense with a human frailty to devastating effect. Sensitive to the point of intolerance to sound, Roderick has become an imploding specter of nervous energy and despair. As he confesses to his friend, “I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR.”

With astonishing economy (this story could — and likely would, by a lesser writer — have easily been stretched into a novel, albeit with lesser impact and effect), Poe manages to invoke his enduring preoccupation of live burial, split personalities, ruminate on the sentience of inanimate objects, and complicate the notions of art imitating life and vice versa, all while steadily orchestrating the ultimate confrontation (twin vs. twin, brother vs. sister, human vs. house, life vs. death). Tragic and absurd as the events become, the narrator is content to leave it as a family matter, hastily escaping as the history of the house and its occupants sink into nothingness.

1. “The Cask of Amontillado”

We’ve discussed a perfect opening section and a perfect closing sentence; “The Cask of Amontillado” is just perfection, period. It represents the consummation of so many of Poe’s aesthetic innovations, crafted so each sentence builds upon the next (like an expertly tiered stone wall…), amping up the humor, irony and, finally, horror. Not a word wasted, an image unnecessary, a line of dialogue inessential and yet, despite the formal symmetry at its heart, a mystery.

What is the insult that drives Montresor’s homicidal rage? It’s never clear, and that only adds an element of menace. Is Montresor, like many of Poe’s most inscrutable murderers, more or less insane? Put another way, it’s difficult to fathom, since he and Fortunato are still at least superficially cordial, any offense that would warrant live entombment.

As with “The Masque of the Red Death”, Poe nimbly operates on multiple levels: there’s an element of class disparity and resentment seething within the dialogue. When Montresor insists that he is, in fact, a mason (one of the delightful ironies, as he pulls out his trowel), it’s easy to overlook Fortunato’s offensive disbelief (“You? Impossible! A mason?”).

There’s also the not inconsiderable matter of Montresor’s family crest, wherein “the foot crushes a serpent rampant whose fangs are imbedded in the heel.” It’s simple to imagine Montresor is the foot smiting the serpent, but it’s possibly more appropriate to consider Montresor as the snake, refusing to die or, if he’s to be defeated, fighting to the death. The motto “Nemo Me Impune Lacessit” (You will not harm me with impunity”) is at once appropriate for his character, yet repugnant.

A writer has succeeded if, in creating a story, a single unforgettable image is imprinted within the reader’s mind. How many such scenes exist in this one short tale? The image of a drunken Fortunato (that name!), in motley — playing the clown, being played for a clown — insistent on proving his expertise, as he’s drawn deeper into the catacombs; the aforementioned passage concerning whether Montresor is, in fact, a mason (producing the trowel, one of the great incidents of foreshadowing in fiction); Montresor, the mason, hurriedly piling brick upon brick; Fortunato, finally comprehending his plight, screaming inside the depths of his crypt, only to have Montresor, full of malevolent confidence, screaming back at him (no one will hear us down here, my friend).

And finally, the most cold-blooded line in Poe’s collected works: “My heart grew sick — on account of the dampness of the catacombs.” Is it, finally, the pang of human remorse? Or is it one last twist of the trowel, one final act of impunity to repay the insult made more than 50 years before? Like the insult itself, we’ll never know.

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10 Essential Edgar Allan Poe Short Stories

Mark Dawidziak's fresh new biography of Edgar Allan Poe, A Mystery of Mysteries , is cleverly framed as an investigation into the writer’s puzzling demise: Poe died in Baltimore in 1849 at age 40 under murky circumstances that have sparked enduring fascination among fans and scholars. Dawidziak surveys the most commonly proposed causes of death, including “binge drinking, rabies, murder, a brain tumor, encephalitis brought on by exposure, syphilis, suicide, [and] heart disease. Though he resists offering a definitive culprit (even as he identifies tuberculosis as the prime suspect), Dawidziak's sharp analysis of Poe’s life and how his more macabre pieces came to overshadow the rest of his work will give readers a fuller understanding of Poe’s artistry and character.

If Edgar Allan Poe could be guided back to this earthly realm and shown the grand extent of his fame, he probably would be both absolutely delighted and more than a little appalled. Certainly, the writer so thoroughly convinced of his own genius would be positively giddy to see that, yes, he is remembered, and continues to be universally read and celebrated. But Poe also would be a bit perturbed to know that this enduring reputation primarily rests on such a small group of wonderfully crafted short stories, so much so that we overwhelmingly identify him as our grand master of the macabre and the mysterious.

Poe prided himself on being a versatile writer, and only a small fraction of his impressive literary output could be classified as horror or mystery. Yet even his best-known poems, starting with “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee,” tend to fall on the shadowy and spooky side of the street. It speaks to why this aspect of Poe’s writing, more than anything else, has kept him alive: he was simply flat-out better at it than anyone else. Poe created both the modern horror story and the model for such super sleuths as Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. Writing short stories for the magazines of his day, Poe took the horror and mystery forms and, in Ray Bradbury’s estimation, “made literature of them.”

Selecting the 10 best Poe short stories, therefore, would inevitably leave out something of greatness. Rather, then, let’s classify these 10 terrific tales as the essentials.

1. “The Tell-Tale Heart” Is it a crime story? A horror tale? It’s both, of course, and it’s also a chilling masterpiece that finds Poe brilliantly prowling the murky boundary between obsession and madness. As the author’s “dreadfully nervous” narrator tells us how an old man’s filmy “pale blue eye” drives him to murder, Poe gives us a master class in establishing mood, building suspense, and maintaining pace, all while expertly employing wonderfully specific gradations of light and sound. Not just a remarkably constructed model for the short story form, “The Tell-Tale Heart” is a near-perfect monologue, with Poe, the son of actors, displaying his ever-keen sense of the dramatic. He tells us just what we need to know, leaving enough unexplained that we continue to speculate about the characters long after the histrionic “tear up the planks” climax. Small wonder this chilling 1843 tale has remained a classroom favorite and a popular performance piece.

2. “The Masque of the Red Death” Poe, who made spectacular use of obsessed and sometimes unreliable narrators, shifted to third-person narrative for this magnificently baroque 1842 story of the “happy and dauntless and sagacious” Prince Prospero, who, at the height of a plague known as the Red Death, seals himself off from the world (and supposedly the pestilence) with 1,000 “hale and light-hearted friends.” Poe is at the height of his fantastic descriptive powers as the dreamlike quality of Prince Prospero’s masked ball turns into a grotesque and ghastly nightmare. Symbolism awaits in each of the masquerade’s seven glaringly illuminated chambers packed with “much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust.” It’s a tale that never loses its resonance because, even when infectious disease isn’t raging, there is never a shortage of human vanity, pride, and folly.

3. “The Cask of Amontillado” It has been said that the best of Poe’s macabre stories and poems should be read out loud. And, indeed, this 1846 story is another stirring example of his ability to construct a gripping soliloquy that artfully draws the reader/listener through the calculated steps leading to murder. A tale of revenge, “The Cask of Amontillado” is narrated by Montressor, who tells us that he bore the thousand injuries of the noble Fortunato as best he could. But when the vain and pompous Fortunato crosses the line and insults Montressor, his fate is sealed. Written when Poe’s feud with former friend Thomas Dunn English had escalated to open warfare , this journey into the catacomb vaults of the Montressors is not just terribly grim, but also grimly humorous. Poe lets us in on the dark and ironic joke as the insulted Montressor toys with the oblivious and inebriated Fortunato, slyly playing on his frailties during their descent into the darkness.

4. “The Fall of the House of Usher” Widely admired by Washington Irving and others when first published in 1839, this fascinating tale has inspired endless discussion and debate about its haunting imagery. Poe probably drew on aspects of his personality for both the doomed Roderick Usher and the unnamed narrator, but neither should be taken as a self-portrait. As both Roderick’s disturbed mind and his decaying ancestral mansion collapse, Poe weaves several of his favorite themes into the richly textured fabric of this tale: premature burial, a beautiful and mysterious young woman stalked by death, a descent into madness, and a cataclysmic storm. “It was a mystery all insoluble,” we are told of this story about Roderick and his twin sister, Madeline. Perhaps, but the “Usher” mysteries continue to invite all manner of allegorical interpretation. Are the Ushers and their house victims of the supernatural? Poe provides no answers, leaving the terror in the eye of the beholder.

5. “The Purloined Letter” Poe’s 1843 buried-treasure mystery tale, “The Gold-Bug,” was one of his most popular compositions, and his 1841 story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” had the distinction of introducing his master detective C. Auguste Dupin. But his most perfectly wrought mystery story by far was his third and final Dupin puzzler, “The Purloined Letter,” first published in 1844. Poe certainly realized what he had accomplished with this ingenious story, rightly considering it his finest tale of ratiocination. The third time was the definite charm for Dupin, for here we find a challenge and a solution worthy of his reputation as a dazzlingly shrewd amateur detective. “Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?” famously asked Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle. On another occasion, Doyle said, “Dupin is unrivaled. It was Poe who taught the possibility of making a detective story a work of literature.” And “The Purloined Letter” is the full realization of that claim.

6. “The Pit and the Pendulum” The unnamed narrator of this 1842 story is a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition in Toledo. He is sentenced by his accusers to “the most hideous of fates.” He will be subjected to a series of insidiously designed tortures until he breathes his last. First he is placed in a completely dark room, and, upon tripping, discovers he is at the rim of a pit. Having escaped a fatal plunge, he is bound to a wooden frame. Overhead, a large pendulum scythe begins to swing, slowly descending toward him. One of Poe’s most suspenseful terror tales, “The Pit and the Pendulum” traps you in that dungeon cell, making you face each vividly described fear and experience the mounting nightmare horror of it all. And yet, as the narrator reminds us, “In death—no! Even in the grave all is not lost!”

7. “Ligeia” This 1838 story was singled out by Poe as one of his favorites, and you can easily see why. Like the earlier (and more lurid) “Berenice” and “Morella,” “Ligeia” tells of a doomed attempt at marriage and the death of a beautiful woman. But “Ligeia” is not merely a far more intriguing and adroitly crafted story. In many ways, the story signals Poe’s arrival as a mature storyteller, beginning an eight-year golden period that saw most of his greatest horror and mystery tales. The slender, raven-haired, dark-eyed Lady Ligeia creepily demonstrates her belief that human will can be stronger than death. She does this by rejuvenating herself in the body of the unnamed narrator’s second wife, the fair-haired, blue-eyed Lady Rowena. George Bernard Shaw was so impressed by the story that he deemed it “not merely one of the wonders of literature: it is unparalleled and unapproached.”

8. “William Wilson” Poe gave the title character his birthday, January 19, and drew on his boyhood experiences at Scottish and English schools for this 1839 doppelgänger story that some too easily and obviously claim as autobiographical. Poe is, however, probing the nature of duality with his narrator, William Wilson, “prey to the most ungovernable passions,” and his double, also named William Wilson, who increasingly takes on the role of his conscience. If Poe understood this ongoing battle within himself, he also recognized the universality of his theme. Echoes of this inner conflict between the perverse and nobler inclinations are noticeable in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, just one of many writers to acknowledge Poe’s influence.

9. “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” Exploiting the era’s widespread fascination with mesmerism, Poe put readers under his spell with this 1845 terror tale of a hypnotist’s attempt to use the trance state to prolong the “life” of his dying friend, M. Ernest Valdemar. Forestalling death and delaying decomposition is not likely to end well, and, after creating some deeply unsettling horror effects, Poe gives us his grisliest gross-out payoff. Yet the tone of the narration is so realistic, many believed this fantastic flight of fiction to be a true account. Stephen King has said that horror stories can hit you on three levels: haunting the brain, racing the heart, and turning the stomach. This works its gruesome magic on all three levels.

10. “Hop-Frog” Like “The Cask of Amontillado,” this is a revenge tale, but it’s markedly different in tone and effect. It’s also the only one of these 10 essential Poe stories that didn’t appear during his 1838–1846 creative stretch. Published in 1849, less than seven months before his death, “Hop-Frog” features a title character who has our total sympathy, despite his horrific plan for retribution. A court jester callously abused by the king and his courtiers, Hop-Frog is a dwarf forced to play the fool while enduring endless humiliation. The cruel monarch laughs with his jester but also at Hop-Frog’s diminutive size and the deformity that gives him a walk that’s part leap, part wiggle. When the king lashes out at the beautiful and kindly Trippetta, an exquisitely proportioned little woman, Hop-Frog plans a hellish form of payback.

most famous short stories by edgar allan poe

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The 25 Best Edgar Allan Poe Stories

Before you see The Raven this weekend (at your own peril), return to the source.

Image via Complex Original

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Once upon a midnight dreary , we awoke to find  Edgar Allan Poe  in the theatres once again. We say "dreary," because according to  IMBD,  Poe's work has been adapted to film 250 times, but not one of those efforts has nailed down the unencumbered tale of Poe's life and work we so badly want to see. Case in point: The Raven , which swoops into theaters today with   John Cusack  taking on the role of the famously enigmatic author , but with none of Poe's trademark macabre flair. Instead, director  James McT eigue  paints Poe as a slick action star, taking a flashy Hollywood spin on his life that would leave Poe furiously clawing at his coffin.

If you're looking to probe Poe's dark and twisted imagination, unconstrained by Cusack, look no further than his classic short stories. While they are fictional tales, critics have long believed that the reality of Poe's life, which was marked by struggle and heartache, was transposed into his work, which is why each tale is encircled by the threat of impending darkness, and tainted by intimations of horror. Take a journey into the many melancholy moods of our favorite morbid author with  The 25 Best Edgar Allan Poe Stories. Before purists riot in the streets, though, be warned: neither "The Raven" or "Annabel Lee," both of which are technically poems, appear for this distinctive reason. And, just a suggestion: You might want to keep the lights on.

[Note: Much of the artwork featured can be attributed to  Harry Clarke, an Irish illustrator and stained glass artist who illustrated Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination . Clarke adds another degree of darkness to Poe's work, and heightens the anxiety embedded in Poe's tales, much like those chill-inducing Stephen Gammell  illustrations that accompanied our favorite childhood series,  Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark . ]

Written by Shanté Cosme ( @ShanteCosme )

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25. "The Premature Burial" (1850)

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Amongst Poe's literary obsessions (which included hypnosis, superstition, and moral ambiguity), his preoccupation with being buried alive might be the most fascinating.

The narrator of "The Premature Burial" is equally entranced by the concept, but his fear has a discernible source: He often falls into a catatonic state that he fears will be mistaken for death and leave him in the predicament of being stuck in the ground way too early. Our narrator lives to tell his story, but not before confronting his debilitating phobia in a surprisingly subdued twist.

In this predecessor to the modern-day, psychologically twisted reality show, My Strange Obsession , Poe tackles what happens when we face our worse fears, and wonders if we can become better from our efforts.

24. "Morella" (1835)

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Ever find yourself growing tired of the person you're in love with? When this story's narrator first met his wife, Morella, his heart "burned with fires it had never before known," but before long he starts to lose that loving feeling for his intellectual wife. Her obsession with mystical writings begins to grate on him; soon, our narrator says he can "no longer bear the touch of her wan fingers" and finds that "the most beautiful became the most hideous."

Much to his relief, Morella kicks the bucket, but in the throes of death, she gives birth to a baby girl who grows up to look, act, and talk exactly like her mother. But instead of being on a Birth tip , her father is so terrified of the young incarnation of his deceased wife that he doesn't even give the kid a name.

Finally, when she's ten-years-old, Dad decides it's time to baptize and name her. The priest asks for the child's name, and he helplessly utters "Morella," at which point his daughter screams, "I am here!" and falls dead. The creepiest part, though? When Dad goes to bury his daughter next to her mother, he finds that there's no body in her tomb, suggesting Morella might have come back for revenge on her loveless husband.

23. "The Murders In The Rue Morgue” (1841)

Touted as the first-ever detective story, Poe's classic "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" centers on Parisian C. Auguste Dupin, who lays down the framework for future fictional detectives, most notably good ol' Sherlock Holmes, in this masterfully weaved tale.

The tale's narrator is the basis of all future Watson-like characters, the storyteller and a sounding-board for the more brilliant detective, and analytical genius, Dupin. The pair read about a murder nearby: Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter, Mademoiselle Camille, have both been killed, and all of their money and belongings have been left in the house, ruling out robbery as a motive

The neighbors do have one insight into the grisly crime, however. They heard two voices in the apartment at the time of the murder, one which they assume to be French, and the other indefinably foreign. The police are befuddled, but Dupin swoops in and outwits them, deducing that the murderer is not a man at all but a...

Chill, we're not going to spoil the outrageous conclusion. We'll let you take on Poe's puzzle for yourself and see if you can match the analytical prowess of the Poe's detective. 

22. "The Gold Bug" (1843)

Poe gifts us with another mystery in "The Gold Bug,"  a brilliant blend of folklore and fiction. But he decides to leave his frequent protagonist Detective Dupin in the dust, instead deploying southerner William Legrand to unravel the puzzle at hand.

In what's basically a buried treasure story, Legrand finds the titular gold bug, a scaraboeus, and is soon after bitten by the creature. Still, he's convinced it will lead him to the desired bounty and emphatically expresses this to his servant Jupiter, who thinks the scarab has poisoned his mind to the point of insanity. We're convinced, too, until Legrand solves an elaborate cryptogram (to which Poe owed much of the story's success; liken it to the modern day Soduku craze), which leads him to serious bundle of cash.

Ironically, "The Gold Bug" earned Poe the most money he earned in his lifetime, $100 for a three-part-installment in the  Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper (double irony!). 

21. "The Imp Of The Perverse" (1850)

What you call impulse, Poe calls "The Imp of the Perverse," a delightfully creepy little phrase that describes our inclination to do the wrong thing just because it's wrong; as in, putting our hand on the stove right after mom has told us not to.

Poe's narrator, confined to a prison cell, explores this "innate and primitive principle," and, in one of the writer's most widely accessible passages, even attributes procrastination to this self-destructive impulse. It is, after all, a behavior which know will cause us pain, that we willing thrust upon ourselves. College, anyone?

"The most important crisis of our life calls, trumpet-tongued, for immediate energy and action... It must, it shall be undertaken to-day, and yet we put it off until to-morrow, and why? There is no answer, except that we feel  perverse , using the word with no comprehension of the principle."

He totally has us with him until he uses this to segue into admitting that he is in jail because he murdered his neighbor with a poisonous candle, a fact that went undetected until a perverse "maddening desire to shriek aloud" a confession of his crime landed him in jail.

Leave it to Poe to captivate us with a profound idea only to carry it out to a completely illogical, insane conclusion.

20. "Eleonora" (1850)

The possibly autobiographical "Eleonora" is a love story which many people assume is about Poe's ill-fated wife (and cousin, who he married when he was 26 and she was 13), Virginia.

The source of the comparison lies on the narrator's similar situation: He's a man who falls in love with his cousin in the Garden-of-Eden-like "Valley of the Many-Colored Grass." Shortly after, in a predictably Poe-like fashion, his object of affection becomes fatally ill and begs the narrator to never leave the valley they fell in love in, and to never love another. He promises he will never leave and never remarry, and then proceeds to do exactly that not long after she dies.

The most improbable element of the story: Eleonora returns from death to give her thumbs-up on the whole ordeal ("Thou art absolved for reasons which shall be made known to thee in Heaven."). Was his real life wife this forgiving? No wonder he married the chick!

19. "William Wilson" (1839)

Poe's most psychologically compelling story, "William Wilson" explores the ways in which we wrestle with the contradictions within ourselves and how we view our own flaws.

We meet William Wilson as a young boy, when he meets a boy in his school who shares his name, dresses just like him, and even shares the same birthday (and, incidentally, the same birthday as Poe himself). William is annoyed by the boy; his new companion is bossy, tells him what to do, and imitates his voice, though he can't speak louder than a whisper. Thus, he plans an attack on the other William Wilson, but when he sneaks into the kid's bedroom he finds his rival's face has changed, and what he sees terrifies him.

William meets the second William again when he begins conning people at gambling. William #2 exposes his vice, forcing him to leave Oxford. The last time William sees his tormentor, he is at a masquerade bash; there, he finds William #2 dressed in the same costume, and, furious at his presence, he decides to stab him. After the murder happens, William looks into a mirror and sees himself bleeding before hearing his rival admit defeat: “In me didst thou exist—and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.”

Many people point to this compelling tale of dual selves as one of Poe's most personal, as William shares a birthday with Poe and is afflicted by the same gambling addiction which forced Poe to leave the University of Virginia after just one semester. Did Poe, like William, assassinate his own conscience so that his vices could reign supreme? Being that Poe reportedly died of "brain swelling," which was a euphemism for alcoholism at the time, it seems like an unfortunate possibility.

18. "The System Of Doctor Tarr And Professor Fether" (1856)

Need proof that Poe had a sense of humor? Look no further than "The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether," the author's comical venture into an insane asylum. Unsurprisingly, Poe captures the insanity part particularly well.

Poe flexes his funny bone (in his own weird way) through this story of a traveler who visits a French mental institution. The head doctor, Monsieur Maillard, takes the narrator on a tour, warning him: "Believe nothing you hear, and only one-half that you see." The narrator is then invited to dinner at the insane asylum, where he's surrounded by a gang of strange characters who are all bizarrely dressed.

He learns that the asylum's previous method of treating patients, which allowed the patients to wander freely, was ultimately abandoned because the patients rebelled on the staff, capturing them and treating them as patients. He is also told that since the incident, no one has been allowed into the hospital, save for a "very stupid-looking young gentleman."

Poe's "crazy posing as sane" act is employed in many of his stories, but never so literally as it is in this crazy little tale of rebellious patients "tarring and feathering" the staff.

17. "Berenice" (1835)

Teeth take on a gruesomely Gothic form in "Berenice," a strange little story about a man who marries his own cousin and reveals a creepy fetish for for her pearly whites.

His cousin, who he describes as a "fantastic beauty," is afflicted by a strange disease that causes her appearance to deteriorate, as well as sporadic catatonic episodes. While she suffers from this affliction, the narrator becomes obsessed with her teeth, which, somehow, have resisted the disease. In a particularly creepy scene, he describes how her teeth "disclosed themselves slowly to [his] view" and laments that he "never beheld them."

Berenice dies, and he later learns that her grave has been plundered and she was found still alive. He then becomes captivated by a box by his bed, and notices his clothes are caked in dirt. He opens the box and finds an even smaller box containing 32 "white and ivory-looking substances," which he realizes are his wife's teeth.

We didn't actually pull (pun totally intended!) anything from Poe's horrific tale, but we did Google-search "tooth fetish" and find that it has a name ( odontophilia ), and, apparently, it  actually exists ! So, there's that.

16. "The Balloon Hoax" (1844)

One of Poe's particular gifts is the ability to tell a wild story through the words of a narrator who seems calm and ordinary, a person you could encounter in everyday life, which is probably why he was able to successfully convince readers that "The Balloon Hoax" was a true story.

Poe submitted this intricately detailed story (which included many technically sound details and the names of several real people) about a man who miraculously crosses the Atlantic Ocean in only three days in a hot air balloon to The Sun . The newspaper then published the story with this headline: "ASTOUNDING NEWS! BY EXPRESS VIA NORFOLK:THE ATLANTIC CROSSED IN THREE DAYS! SIGNAL TRIUMPH OF MR. MONCK MASON'S FLYING MACHINE!!!"

The story caused the newspaper's New-York-based building to be overrun by excited readers, but was quickly revealed to be a hoax and retracted just two days later. Still, Poe's efforts were successful in so far that he had convinced many people that his tale was true and he proudly observed that he had "never witnessed more intense excitement to get possession of a newspaper."

15. "Hop-Frog" (1845)

Much like "The Cask of Amontillado," "Hop-Frog" is, at his heart, about the nature of revenge; in this case, the vengeful subject is the king's favorite jester, a dwarf named Hop-frog.

The king invites Hop-Frog and his closest friend, a fellow dwarf named Tripetta, over and forces Hop-Frog to drink wine, even though the narrator notes that Hop-Frog was not a fan of drinking because it "excited the poor cripple almost to madness." Triepetta tries to stop the king, but he cruelly pushes her down and throws wine in her face. Hop-Frog is enraged, but, rather than showing his anger, he plays a prank of his own on the king. He convinces the king and his cabinet to dress like "Ourang-Outangs," which he says will scare the women. They agree, and the dwarf parades them, chained together, at the masquerade ball, and proceeds to set them all on fire in front of the crowd.

Poe closes his bloody midget revenge story with these brilliant last words: “This is my last jest.” Seriously, what more could you want?

14. "The Oval Portrait" (1842)

Poe makes a unique observation on the often hazy line between life and art in his shortest short story, "The Oval Portrait."

A reversal of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray , "The Oval Portrait" finds our narrator telling us about an entrancing painting of a beautiful woman he finds in an abandoned mansion (a gloomy structure which he notes the queen of Gothic Ann Radcliffe would approve of). He finds a book that details the house's artwork, which describes how the artist of the painting neglected his wife, being so entrenched in his work. Unaware of the pain he put on his young wife, he literally draws the life out of her for his painting, finishing his masterpiece to find her dead, her liveliness having been imparted on the painting itself.

Poe's tale seems to critique not only the danger of over-emphasizing the importance of art but also the world's over-focus on work, in general. So, workaholics, take note, and quit neglecting your lady in favor of your 9-to-5! (For further commentary on this subject, see Kanye's touching song on the matter.)

13. "The Spectacles" (1850)

In a departure from his heavy leaning toward horror, this short story shows Poe's quirky, irony-heavy sense of humor. 

On the surface, "The Spectacles" claims to be about "love at first sight," but what it actually recounts in a silly little fable in which the narrator becomes enamored with a woman he sees from a distance, while not wearing his spectacles. He spends much of the story discussing the woman's beauty "the most exquisite [he] had ever beheld." He tells his friends about the women who caught his eyes, and woos her from afar before eventually proposing marriage. Her only request of him is that he wear his glasses on their wedding night. When he finally puts his spectacles on, he finds his young hot thing is actually an 82-year-old woman, and worse yet, his own great-great-grandmother, "grinning and foaming."

Poe's narrator learns an important lesson after his "love at first sight" experience, concluding that he will "never again be met without SPECTACLES." A latter-day mention to beer goggles, perhaps?

12. "A Descent Into The Maelström" (1845)

Long before the SyFy channel dug its talons into the American psyche, Poe grabbed a foothold into the genre with a quirky little story called "A Descent Into The Maelström."

In what's essentially A Perfect Storm with a  Twilight Zone twist, the tale's narrator, a frail, silver-haired man, tells us about how his fishing ship got caught in an unfathomably powerful whirlpool, and recounts how the  maelström swallowed the boat and his brothers whole. The narrator uses his deductive prowess to survive, but with one cavaeat: He now appears as feeble old man. The  Maelström seems to have stolen his youth.

Is this the embellished yarn the product of  senility, or has the "old" man witnessed a seemingly implausible natural phenomenon, doomed to be wrongly deemed a liar for the rest of his days? Poe leaves it to us to decide.

11. "Never Bet The Devil Your Head" (1850)

The idea of "making a deal with the devil" has taken on a great number of incarnations, but no Fasutian bargain could outdo the morally ambiguous protagonist in "Never Bet the Devil Your Head."

The story's narrator, who only acts as an observer in the tale, tells us about an immoral guy, aptly named Toby Dammit, who is riddled with a litany of vices, including a penchant for gambling. Toby's obsessive gambling escalates to the point that he begins betting on minor incidents, and in lieu of wagering money, instead takes to saying, "I'll bet the devil my head," putting his neck on the line for meaningless bets.

One day, the narrator is traveling with Toby and he bets the narrator he can leap over a turnstile in the distance, and bets the devil his head he can clear it. Suddenly, a "little lame old gentleman of venerable aspect" appears and urges Toby to make the jump. Toby takes the jump,  falls backwards mid-leap, and the old man hobbles up to his fallen figure and runs away with something. The narrator finds that Toby has been beheaded by a metal bar that was right over the turnstile, but his head is nowhere to be found.

This satire is Poe's response to critics who, at the time, condemned his writing as amoral. While the story's original subtitle, "A Tale With a Moral," seemed to denote it as a direct response to those claims, the subject matter dismisses the argument that literature should have moral responsibility.

10. “The Black Cat" (1842)

The premise of "The Black Cat," as in several of Poe's stories, hinges on one underlying question: Is our narrator sane? The unnamed man awaiting his death sentence tells us a story of "mere household events" as if he's going to rattle off a anecdote about something that happened at dinner. He then proceeds to mentally unhinge right before our eyes, yet throughout the story his rational tone always suggests the semblance of sanity.

The ultimate object of our narrator's undoing? His favorite pet, a black cat who dotingly follows him around, and whose eye he cuts out in a moment of drunken fury. The narrator tries to reason with us about the incident, dismissing it as some Freudian impulse: "Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not ?" And, he has us a going for a moment (who hasn't done the bad-just-because thing?); that is, until "the spirit of perverseness" consumes him, and he unleashes his bloody fury on his unsuspecting wife.

In the end, the narrator's own guilt is the cause of his demise, and we're left contemplating his motives: Was he a sane man gone maniacal, or a maniac incredibly well-versed in seeming sane?

9. "The Facts In The Case Of M. Valdemar" (1845)

Poe's greatest success with "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" is that he managed to convince the world that it was a true story. It's about a man who undergoes hypnosis at the very moment of death, prompting countless letters of people demanding to know more about what they believed was a scientific experiment.

Why was Poe's story so well-received as truth? As the title indicates, the facts of M. Valdemar's condition are laid down in a very matter-of-fact manner, allowing us to trust the narrator's observations of his patient who buoys between the realms of death and life in terrible detail. Though there may be too much detail if you're weak stomached, as Poe enumerates every oozing orifice  explicitly and unflinchingly.

It's Poe's unflinching attention to the particulars of "the case" that prompted Victorian poetess Elizabeth Barrett Browning to give props to Poe for "making horrible improbabilities seem near and familiar."

8. "MS. Found In A Bottle" (1833) 

Another one of Poe's sci-fi adventure stories, "MS. Found in a Bottle" draws on spectacular events caused by nature, and, much like "A Descent Into the Maelstrom," revolves around a enormous whirlpool with supernatural properties.

A narrator recounts an at-sea story of a typhoon that spurred a whirlpool so large the ship he was on was almost swallowed entirely, before being suspended in a vortex of water that "rage[d] with unabated violence" and knocking everyone off the boat except for the narrator and an old Swedish guy. A red light cuts through the darkness, and the two see a black ship riding the water, which an errant waves thrusts them onto. It's on this mystery-enshrouded ship, where the crew seem to be oblivious to the narrator's presence, that he writes the message he puts into the bottle of his ultimately fatal foray aboard the southbound ship, whose sail reads "DISCOVERY."

Poe submitted his short story of this perplexing journey into the sea to a writing content advertised in a Baltimore periodic al , and snagged the win and a $50 prize for his efforts.

7. "The Purloined Letter" (1845) 

C. Auguste  Dupin,  Poe's trailblazing detective (who also makes an appearance in both "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt") returns in this tidy little mystery about a letter that's sneakily swapped out for another.

The owner of the purloined letter is a woman of royal order, who has the sensitive material stolen by a government man named Minister D——; he uses the information he gathers from the letter to blackmail the lady. Dupin dukes it out alongside the Parisian police to find the letter and return it to its owner, and ultimately Dupin emerges victorious thanks to his superior intellect, which he uses to discern the letters whereabouts.

While the story purposely avoids the graphic, gory details Poe often utilizes in his other works, "The Purloined Letter" does have one trademark Poe touch: It completely leaves out what the letter is actually about! Poe delves into Dupin's search with great detail, yet never reveals why we should care about the actual letter. To his credit, the story is so engaging that we still get wrapped up in it.

6. “The Pit And The Pendulum” (1843)

Many of Poe's stories reveal their macabre nature in vivid, devilish detail, but "The Pit and The Pendulum" rests on the fear of the unknown, our terror mounting with each descriptor Poe withholds. 

Poe introduces readers to yet another unnamed narrator, this one having been imprisoned by the Spanish Inquisition and, presumably, awaiting death. He awakes to finds himself in a dark cell and is forced to discern his surroundings with his limited sense and reasoning alone. As the titular torture device, a swinging pendulum in the shape of the Grim Reaper's scythe, inches down towards his chest, our hearts race with the narrator's scanning our imagination for a way around his impending death.

Modern-day horror flicks that rely on graphic scenes of savagery could learn a thing or two from Poe, who unleashes more dread with the possibility of death than most movies could with a slew of blood-soaked scenes.

5. "Ligeia" (1838)

On the surface, "Ligeia" seems to be the same story as "Morella": The narrator's intellectual wife dies and then lives again. So what's the principle difference? The narrator here, rather than being relived by his wife's death, is heartbroken. This subtle difference makes "Ligeia" a love story, albeit a very creepy one.

Our narrator's love, the titular woman, is a dark-haired beauty who becomes ill. Right before Ligeia dies, she reads a poem of Poe's, "The Conqueror Worm" (1843), about demonic worm-like creatures who eat mimes limb by limb, which symbolizes the perversity of nature and the inevitability of decay. Her poem proves true when the narrator remarries and his second wife, Rowena, also becomes fatally ill. For a brief moment after Rowena dies, her corpse reanimates and takes the form of Ligeia.

Again, Poe leaves us with unanswered questions. Has Ligeia really risen from the dead, or has she merely risen in the narrator's imagination? This inscrutability of Ligeia's resurrection merits a dozen re-readings of Poe's uncomfortably romantic tale. 

4. “The Fall Of The House of Usher” (1839)

“The Fall of the House of Usher” is Poe's take on the quintessential haunted house tale, but, of course, with a macabre twist. The titular house acts as a character in the story; it's a decaying mansion with "an atmosphere of sorrow" that ensnares its inhabitants, even if they enter willingly.

The house belongs to the narrator's childhood friend, Roderick Usher, who has called his pal to his side because he's feeling mentally and physically uneasy. At the house, the narrator meets Roderick's twin sister, Madeline, who is also very ill, and whose existence the narrator was previously unaware of. Madeline dies shortly after the narrator meets her, and he and Roderick bury her in a tomb beneath the house. Madeline's death seems to ignite the house's inherent evil— neon gases are seen floating its perimeter, and Roderick becomes distraught, eventually admitting that he fears he may have buried his sister alive.

The chill-inducing conclusion, which results in the literal and figurative collapse of the Usher house, leaves us wondering just what about that house made it so damn malevolent. Poe, as he ha s a habit of doing, never explains.

3. "The Masque Of The Red Death" (1850)

Poe's Gothic masterpiece, "The Masque of the Red Death" explores themes of death and vanity that weave themselves throughout most of his work, a fear Poe may have honed in on in at this time in particular due to his wife Virginia being in the throes of tuberculosis. Not that he ever needed an excuse to be morbid, though.

The story takes place in Prince Prospero 's castle, where the royal character is having a lavish masquerade to distract himself from the Red Death, a plague ravaging the population outside the castle's walls. In an intriguing decor choice, Prospero chooses to cloak each room in a single color, inciting fear in the guests of a particular room that is doused in a scarlet hue. As the party goes on, an intruder appears with a physical appearance that unleashes a gruesome effect upon those who come in contact with him.

Chilling and thought-provoking, Poe's classic tale interrogates the identity of death in a way few have since.

2. "The Cask Of Amontillado" (1846)

Proving Poe's ability to instill terror in just about anything, "The Cask of Amontillado" manifests horror through a couple of winos. The narrator, Montresor, exacts revenge on his friend Forunato, using his wine connoisseurship to achieve his terrifying ends.

Montresor preys on his friend's vanity, telling him about a rare vintage of Spanish wine, Amontillado, which Fortunato volunteers himself to taste, believing he is the only one who could verify its authenticity. Fortunato, ironically dressed as a jester, accompanies Montresor to his wine vault, a winding set of catacombs that unknowingly lead to his death. Montresor takes advantage of the Fortunato's drunken state and easily chains him to a wall in a niche, where he proceeds to kill Fortunato's buzz by sealing him into the wall with stones, and even throws a torch in with him to seal the deal further.

Poe's most sinisterly brilliant detail? We never learn why exactly Montresor kills Fortunato; all that's mentioned is that Fortunato "ventured upon insult," leaving us to wonder if Montresor is either extremely sensitive or ape-shit crazy.

1. “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843)

We can't say why, but amongst the things that haunted Poe, eyes seem to keep popping up (or popping out, as it is). Whether it's brown-eyed girls like "Ligeia," or the accusing eyes of The Black Cat, Poe often portrays narrators who are intimidated by what lurks inside those dark sockets.

The narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" takes it to another level, murdering a man for his incriminating peepers alone. Peep, pun intended, the horror: "He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture—a pale blue eye with film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold and so by degrees—very gradually—I made up mi mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever."

The old man's eyes are the source of his unwarranted demise, but it's his beating heart that ultimately urge the deed, and, later, betray the narrator's guilt, in this darkly playful tale of paranoia.  

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most famous short stories by edgar allan poe

The Best Edgar Allan Poe Stories

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Ranker Books

The Tell-Tale Heart

The Cask of Amontillado

The Cask of Amontillado

The Masque of the Red Death

The Masque of the Red Death

The Fall of the House of Usher

The Fall of the House of Usher

Ligeia

The Black Cat

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

The Pit and the Pendulum

The Pit and the Pendulum

The Purloined Letter

The Purloined Letter

A Descent into the Maelström

A Descent into the Maelström

The Oval Portrait

The Oval Portrait

The Oblong Box

The Oblong Box

The Gold-Bug

The Gold-Bug

Eleonora

William Wilson

The Man That Was Used Up

The Man That Was Used Up

The Premature Burial

The Premature Burial

The Imp of the Perverse

The Imp of the Perverse

Morella

Ms. Found in a Bottle

The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether

The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether

The Sphinx

The Man of the Crowd

The Island of the Fay

The Island of the Fay

The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar

The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar

Landor's Cottage

Landor's Cottage

The Angel of the Odd

The Angel of the Odd

Mellonta Tauta

Mellonta Tauta

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18 Best Stories by Edgar Allan Poe

By edgar allan poe edited by vincent price and chandler brossard, category: short stories | gothic & horror | suspense & thriller.

Apr 15, 1965 | ISBN 9780440322276 | 4-3/16 x 6-7/8 --> | ISBN 9780440322276 --> Buy

Jul 04, 2012 | ISBN 9780307823076 | ISBN 9780307823076 --> Buy

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About 18 Best Stories by Edgar Allan Poe

A chilling compilation of some of Edgar Allen  Poe’s best-loved stories, edited by Vincent Price and  Chandler Brossard and with an introduction by  Vincent Price, including: The Black  Cat – The Fall of the House of Usher – The Masque  of the Red Death – The Facts in the Case of M.  Valdemar – The Premature Burial – Ms. Found in a Bottle  - A Tale of the Ragged Mountains – The Sphinx -  The Murders in the Rue Morgue – The Tell-Tale Heart  - The Gold-Bug – The System of Dr. Tarr and  Prof. Fether – The Man That Was Used Up – The Balloon  Hoax – A Descent Into the Maelstrom – The  Purloined Letter – The Pit and The Pendulum – The Cask of  Amontillado

Also by Edgar Allan Poe

The Masque of the Red Death

About Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, USA, in 1809. Poe, short story writer, editor and critic, he is best known for his macabre tales and as the progenitor of the detective story. He died in 1849, in mysterious circumstances, at… More about Edgar Allan Poe

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The Fall of the House of Usher

A brief survey of the short story, part 55: Edgar Allan Poe

"I cannot think of any other author", said Harold Bloom of Edgar Allan Poe, "who writes so abominably, and yet is so clearly destined to go on being canonical." But for each writer who has disparaged him, from Henry James to Yeats, Lawrence to Auden, there is an array of works that bear his influence: stories and novels not only by horror specialists like HP Lovecraft and Stephen King, or by writers of detective fiction such as Arthur Conan Doyle , but by Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, Edith Wharton, Thomas Mann, TS Eliot, Joyce, Faulkner, Borges, Eudora Welty, Nabokov and Bolaño. Like the obsessions that so often lead to the annihilation of Poe's narrators, his influence cannot be escaped.

When Poe began writing stories in earnest in the early 1830s, the gothic genre, by far the most popular in the periodicals of the day, was, in artistic terms, distinctly hackneyed. Responding to sniffy charges of "Germanism", in the preface to his first collection, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), Poe averred that "terror is not of Germany, but of the soul", and one of the primary reasons for the longevity of his stories lies with their ability to present stock scenarios (live burial, the doppelgänger, possession) in ways that tap into far more profound wells of horror than most gothic authors – or horror writers generally – locate. These atmospheres transcend his sometimes turgid prose, and the finales described as the "campy, floozy 'Boo!' business at the end", by offering destabilising visions of madness, obsessive love, cruelty and endemic menace.

Ever since Marie Bonaparte's pioneering study from a Freudian perspective, published in 1934 (which, wrote Richard Wilbur, "though absurd in all the expected ways … comes up with many constants of imagery and narrative pattern"), Poe's works have often been considered proto-psychological. As Benjamin F Fisher notes, this way of reading them "finds excellent symbols in the spiralling staircases and downward spirals into ocean depths or mouldering sub-cellars of ruinous mansions and abbeys" they abound in. Similarly, while individual stories might take place in London (The Man of the Crowd), off the coast of Norway (Descent Into the Maelström), or a "chain of wild and dreary hills that lie westward and southward of Charlottesville" (A Tale of the Ragged Mountains, the only story Poe set in his native Virginia), the vagueness of many of the settings reinforces the sense that it is really internal, psychic landscapes they are describing.

This idea is underlined by Poe's repeated presentation of buildings as metaphors for the human mind. In The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), his most controlled, concentrated story, he describes a rotting mansion with a crack running through it. Likewise the incestuous Usher twins, Roderick and Madeline, are two halves of a divided self that, once separated, disintegrates. In William Wilson (1839), Poe's superb take on the doppelgänger myth, the boarding school where the narrator and his uncanny double Wilson first encounter one another has "no end to its windings – to its incomprehensible subdivisions". Just as the two boys seem to represent the competing natures of a single psyche, so within the school building it is "difficult, at any given time, to say with certainty upon which of its two storeys one happened to be". Hidden away like an unpleasant notion, Wilson rooms in one of the "many little nooks or recesses" that entail "the odds and ends of the structure". The gap here between Poe's fiction and later theories of repression, or the narrator's "wild, confused and thronging memories of a time when memory herself was yet unborn" and the Freudian unconscious, is irresistibly narrow.

Poe's genius in William Wilson is to tell the story not of a good protagonist bedevilled by an evil twin, but of a corrupt man tormented by a vision of his better self. How like our own internal lives, haunted by the better decisions and kinder acts of our ideal selves. As Poe's biographer Kenneth Silverman points out, doubling is a recurring feature of Poe's work, from the Usher twins and William Wilson to the sleuth C Auguste Dupin and his arch enemy in The Purloined Letter, Minister D–. The occluded name invites the possibility – never distant in Poe – that Dupin's adversary is in fact an alternate version of himself.

Poe's three Dupin stories, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Rogêt and The Purloined Letter, created the template for detective fiction that Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie would use for their most famous creations, Conan Doyle saying of Poe's detective stories that "each is a root from which a whole literature has developed". Dupin is a man, in Peter Thoms's phrase, with the "ability to read the mysterious space of the city". He is a decipherer of symbols, and it is this ability that Borges – who cites Poe throughout his work – transplants into Erik Lönnrot, a detective who considers himself "a pure thinker, an Auguste Dupin", whose murder investigation revolves around the secret name of the Hebrew god.

Lönrott's quest turns out to be a dead end, the case an elaborate trap. Unlike the Dupin of The Purloined Letter, he cannot outwit his criminal counterpart. Jacques Lacan made much of the fact that in Poe's story every character is driven to act by a letter (or "signifier") whose contents are unknown, and the blankness of the purloined letter is just one of many significant absences to be found in Poe's work. Why, in The Murders in the Rue Morgue, were the two victims rearranging the contents of an iron chest at three in the morning? In The Cask of Amontillado, what is the insult for which Montresor enacts his hideous revenge on Fortunato? What is the incomprehensible horror the narrator neglects to describe in The Pit and the Pendulum? These, like the uncertainty of setting discussed earlier, almost goad readers to supply their own meaning. "Poe believed", writes Louise J Kaplan, "that truly imaginative literature locates its deepest meaning in an undercurrent. The surfaces of his tales are always deceptions", requiring effort to "detect the embedded secrets". There is also another possibility: that these absences bid the reader to supply their own meaning, to interact with and map their own guilt, urges and frustrations onto the stories.

Two of Poe's most famous stories, The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat (both 1843), revolve around the same absence: the motive for the murders they describe. "I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him", the narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart tells us, while death in The Black Cat arrives suddenly and unexpectedly, apparently as much a surprise to the murderous narrator as to us ("I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain"). Both stories are monologues, both describe maniacal states, and both contain passages of unusually blunt prose, as striking as a folk tale's: "The night waned; I worked hastily, but in silence. First of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs".

The echoes of these distinctive, reliably unreliable voices, which foreshadow the stream-of-consciousness technique, can be heard, as shouts or whispers, in works by authors such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Nabokov, Thomas Bernhard and Roberto Bolaño. In his Advice on the Art of Writing Short Stories, Bolaño writes: "The honest truth is that with Edgar Allan Poe, we would all have more than enough good material to read", and his By Night in Chile can be considered a homage. The book is a novel-length monologue by a right-wing priest, Father Urrutia Lacroix, who is also the pseudonymous literary critic H Ibacache. It is a supposed confession, the rant of a man haunted by his former self, and over the course of the book Urrutia proves as slippery as Poe's earlier creations, while his narrative contains the distinctly gothic vision of a husband torturing political prisoners in the basement while his wife entertains guests upstairs. Like Poe's central works, Bolaño's novel enacts the battle of the divided self, placing us on a steep pathway descending from surface respectability into darker drives and longings.

Next: Clarice Lispector

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  • Arthur Conan Doyle

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20 Best Edgar Allan Poe Stories and Poems

Edgar Allan Poe is widely considered one of the most important writers in the canon of American literature, and in particular, of the 19th century.

Regarded by many as the central figure of American Romanticism, particularly the Gothic, he was also an originator of the short story in America and of the detective crime fiction genre. Best known for his poetry, short stories, and literary criticism, Poe wrote and edited prolifically during his short life.

Now, every Halloween, he’s the most quoted writer, hands down. (If you want a great mystery for Halloween, check out The 25 Best Mystery Books of All Time .)

But who was Edgar Allan Poe, really? So many myths surround him, so let’s get a few things straight.

Born in Boston on January 19, 1809, Poe was the second child of actors David and Elizabeth “Eliza” Arnold Hopkins Poe. David, however, wasn’t around long for the family and abandoned Eliza with two young children in 1810. A year later, Eliza died, and Poe was informally adopted by John and Frances Allan of Richmond, Virginia. Poe started gambling young — in tune with the obsessive personality that would follow him his entire life. Though he attended the University of Virginia for a year, he left when his gambling problem ran out of control.

In 1827, he enlisted in the United States Army under a pseudonym, also publishing his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, under the simple name “A Bostonian.” The Army sent Poe to West Point, but he soon failed out, also falling completely out of favor with his adoptive family.

But soon he had a little family of his own. Poe married Virginia Clemm, his 13-year-old cousin, in 1836. Working for several literary journals and periodicals — mostly as a critic — Poe and Clemm moved to Philadelphia, then New York City, and finally to Baltimore.

It was in Baltimore that Poe finally found the literary success he so craved with the publication of his poem “The Raven” in January 1845. In 1847, Virginian Clemm died of tuberculosis. Though Poe continued writing after her death, his own health became increasingly precarious. Poe died on October 7, 1849, in Baltimore. How did he die? We’re not exactly true, but the cause is widely speculated, some arguing for alcoholism, tuberculosis, rabies, or even suicide.

At the time of his death, Poe was just 40 years old. Yet he left a hefty body of literary work in his wake.

This post is a guide to 20 of his best works, including short stories, poems, and essays.

Table of Contents

2. The Balloon Hoax

3. annabel lee, 4. eleonora, 5. to my mother, 6. sonnet-to science, 7. the masque of the red death, 8. a dream within a dream, 9. the tell-tale heart, 10. spirits of the dead, 11. william wilson, 12. silence, 13. romance, 14. the facts in the case of m. valdemar, 15. eldorado, 16. the fall of the house of usher, 17. the haunted palace, 18. berenice, 19. the spectacles, 20. the raven.

“From childhood’s hour, I have not been / As others were—I have not seen / As others saw,” Poe writes in the poem “Alone.”

Lesser known than many of his longer poems or gothic short stories, “Alone” offers us a look into Poe’s obsession with the macabre from a young age. He ends the poem by eerily seeing “(When the rest of Heaven was blue) Of a demon in my view—”

This 1844 short story appeared in the New York Sun as if it was a real piece of news! Poe, however, was a master of literary extortion. “The Balloon Hoax,” tells the story of a fictional passenger balloon, the Victoria, which supposedly crossed the Atlantic Ocean in just three days to land near Charleston, South Carolina.

One of Poe’s most famous poems, “Annabel Lee” tells the story of a woman tragically eaten by the sea she so loved. She was thrown there by angels jealous of the love between Annabel and the poem’s narrator, a gothic rendering of Christian theology if there ever was one. The poem inspired a 2009 horror film of the same name.

Poe isn’t known for his short stories with happy endings. But “Eleonora” isn’t your typical short story on many levels.

The story tells the tale of a man living with his aunt and a much younger cousin in The Valley of the Many-Colored Grass. They are isolated but happy, and after a decade-and-a-half of living in this manner, “Love entered.”

The man is enchanted by his young cousin, and they fall in love with one another. When she tragically dies, the man vows to never marry “to any daughter of Earth.” Most scholars find the story to be one of Poe’s more autobiographical.

Remaining in the vein of sweet Poe, a few of his collected works is the fine little poem, “To My Mother.” We know Poe’s family life was complicated from birth, to say the least. But his biological mother, who died when Poe was still an infant, remained a beloved mythical creature in his mind and writing throughout his life, as did the other mothers in his life.

He addresses them in this oddly sweet verse, writing, “Because I feel that, in the Heavens above, / The angels, whispering to one another, / Can find, among their burning terms of love, / None so devotional as that of ‘Mother’.”

“Sonnet—To Science” — Poe joined a series of prominent nineteenth-century American intellectuals in rejecting religion, men and women who devoted themselves to the pursuit of science.

But at heart, Poe was still a romantic. “Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!” he begins in this odd little love sonnet to science. Then he asks, “Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart, / Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?” Poe, in both poetry and verse, was consumed by the metaphysical.

Writers often confront the pressing issues of their day through allegory, and 1842’s “The Masque of the Red Death” offers Poe at his finest in joining this long literary tradition.

In the story, Prince Prospero attempts to avoid a dangerous plague, the Red Death, by hiding in an abbey. Most believe the Red Death is an allegory for tuberculous, the disease that would kill Poe’s wife and possibly Poe himself.

With one of the most well-known couplets in Poe’s poetry — “All that we see or seem / Is but a dream within a dream. — “

A Dream Within a Dream” is the height of American Romanticism in verse. According to the Academy of American Poets, “Romantic poets cultivated individualism, reverence for the natural world, idealism, physical and emotional passion, and an interest in the mystic and supernatural.

Romantics set themselves in opposition to the order and rationality of classical and neoclassical artistic precepts to embrace freedom and revolution in their art and politics.” Here, Poe certainly cultivates an individualism, as he would do for the rest of his career.

Perhaps the most famous of Poe’s short stories, “The Tell-Tale Heart” is a standard curriculum in many American literature classes, from middle and high school to university surveys.

Published in 1843, it features a nameless narrator — trademark to Poe’s work more generally — who is going mad following a murder he committed.

The narrator believes he has committed the perfect murder until he is constantly haunted by what he believes to be his victim’s thumping heart. “The Tell-Tale Heart” is considered one of the finest works of American Gothic fiction.

Poe’s fascination with death and haunting is seemingly endless. In the poem “Spirits of the Dead,” he writes, “Thy soul shall find itself alone / ’Mid dark thoughts of the gray tombstone—” but that we should celebrate this place, for death allows us, finally, to “Be silent in that solitude, / Which is not loneliness.”

Not the most uplifting of poems, even for Poe, but certainly a fine representation of his turning morbid into something more familiar and thus, acceptable. Need a break from all this doom and gloom? Check out Up Journey’s guide to the 27 Best Books on Happiness and Joy.

This early (1839) short story chronicles the life of a young nobleman, William Wilson, who meets his doppelgänger, also William Wilson, in school. The noble Wilson dismisses their shared name, their shared birthday of January 19 (also Poe’s birthday), and their shared appearance.

After being haunted by his twin, Wilson finally admits that his mirror was but the dark side of himself, saying, “mine own image, but with features all pale and dabbled in blood.”

Poe didn’t only obsess over dream states in verse. In this 1838 short story, a demon observes the actions of a solitary man in a desolate land of sadness and death.

Of course, that land ends up being a dream, but the story, short as it is, remains one of the most confusing, lyrical examples of Poe’s enduring prose.

We often forget that Poe felt deeply. But in the poem “Romance,” he writes, “My heart would feel to be a crime / Unless it trembled with the strings” of passion.

Exemplary of his ability to move between the classically romantic and the macabre, this poem is not often read but is an important part of Poe’s collected works.

This 1845 short story illustrates well Poe’s obsession with trying to communicate with the dead or dying. At the center of this tale is a mesmerist who hypnotizes a man at the exact moment of his death.

One of his goriest stories — Poe loved medical textbooks and consumed them voraciously — many readers thought the story to be an actual scientific report and not a work of fiction. (We, too, find hypnosis pretty interesting! Check out Up Journey’s guide to The 11 Best Self Hypnosis Books.)

A poem subsequently sung by many, “Eldorado” shows some of Poe’s finest lyrical tightness in verse. The poem ends with some of the most famous of Poe’s lines: “‘Over the Mountains / Of the Moon, / Down the Valley of the Shadow, / Ride, boldly ride,’ / The shade replied,— / ‘If you seek for Eldorado!’” Few scholars agree on what Eldorado is actually an allegory for.

Many a high school student has responded to an essay question on “The Fall of the House of Usher,” one of Poe’s most famous stories. The story is famous for good reason.

Published in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine in 1839, the story is one of Poe’s more narratively driven, chronicling the literal (and metaphorical) destruction of Roderick Usher’s once-grand house.

Not surprisingly, Poe was also obsessed with places he felt to be haunted, spirit-filled, or otherwise storied. In “The Haunted Palace,” Poe writes of “Once a fair and stately palace” gone to ruin because “evil things, in robes of sorrow, / Assailed the monarch’s high estate.”

Indeed, Poe enjoyed deploying themes of decay again and again. In the 1835 story “Berenice,” Poe returns to a familiar narrative. It is the story of Egaeus, a man who is preparing to marry his cousin Berenice.

In the story, Berenice is dying from a mysterious disease that slowly rots her body until all that remains are her teeth. Similar to the heart in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Berenice’s teeth haunt Egaeus until he, like the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” goes mad.

The finest of Poe’s comedic writing, 1844’s “The Spectacles” is a story about love at first sight. A young man, Napoleon Bonaparte Froissart, instantly falls in love with a rich widow, Madame Eugenie Lalande.

When he asks her to marry him, she agrees but demands that he wears glasses on their wedding night. When they go to consummate their nuptials, Napoleon quickly realizes that Eugenie is actually a hideous toothless woman of 82 years old.

The most enduring of Poe’s poems, and a Halloween staple, “The Raven” deploys some of the most well-known languages of American storytelling. It begins: “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, / Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—.”

Like many of Poe’s stories and poems, “The Raven” is about a haunting creature, this time a bird, not a heart or teeth, who never leaves its narrator in peace. “And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting / On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door.”

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D. Gilson holds a Ph.D. in American Literature & Cultural Studies from The George Washington University and has taught writing and popular culture studies at the university level for more than a decade.

The Surprisingly Overlooked Detail About Edgar Allan Poe's Writing

Detective noir photo collage

Edgar Allen Poe  famously wrote about madness, guilt, pestilence, decay, black cats and ravens, a dude getting bricked up alive in a wall ( or immurement ), another dude getting slowly guillotined to death across the stomach, and more. In many instances Poe's writing is thematically horrific, its descriptions lurid and disturbing, and its subject matter unnerving — but that's just the surface level. Those keen on Poe's work might notice a certain spooky thread of mystery winding through his tales. Secrets get unveiled, truths uncovered, and bit by bit the reader comes to some final realization about what's happening in the text. In other words, kind of like a detective story.

As many don't know, detective stories are exactly what Poe pioneered. Early in his career he wrote the ghost story "Ligeia" in 1838 and the well-known "The Fall of the House of Usher" in 1839. But before turning toward overt horror, Poe in 1841 released "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," which he called one of his "tales of ratiocination" — tales of reason and logic, per the National Parks Service . The story wasn't intended to be a "detective story" — those kinds of things didn't exist. Sherlock Holmes , the character, didn't show up in print until 1887, 46 years later. Agatha Christie's first novel, "The Mysterious Affair at Styles," was released in 1920, 33 years after Holmes. And all of our modern police procedurals didn't crop up until the 1950s. It was Edgar Allen Poe who launched the entire genre of detection fiction.  

The very first detective story

It's important to note that Edgar Allen Poe wrote during what's been dubbed the "American Romantic" period. In these years — roughly 1830 to the end of the U.S. Civil War in 1865 — none of our modern literary genres existed. No one was perusing shelves at a local Barnes & Noble and looking for the latest eye-catching young adult novel cover. In fact, Poe was so ahead of the curve that in addition to pioneering the detective novel and some gloriously macabre fiction, he was also arguably the "architect" of the modern short story, itself (per  Poets.org ). Bear in mind that the "novel," as a type of book, didn't exist until 1605 with the publishing of "Don Quixote," less than 250 years before Poe wrote. During Poe's life there were no hard distinctions between novels and the kind of shorter stories that he wrote.

Not only did Poe pave the path for all subsequent gumshoes to poke through crime scene evidence and make deductions, he did it using the same kind of serialized detective character reflected in later persons like Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, all the way to Columbo and more. Poe's arch-crime-solver was Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin, who uses the aforementioned "ratiocination" (reason, logic, etc.) to figure out who murdered two women in 1841's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." Poe wrote two more stories featuring Dupin in the lead role: 1842's "The Mystery of Marie Roget" and 1844's "The Purloined Letter." 

[Featured image by Unknown author via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled]

Playing fair with the reader

When we say that Edgar Allen Poe wrote the first "detective story," you might be wondering what he did differently from writers before him. As the aptly-named World's Best Detective, Crime, and Murder Mystery Books  explains, in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" Poe did two things that all other detective stories have done to be properly classified as such: "play fair" and "be readable."

"Playing fair" means recruiting the reader to solve the mystery along with the detective. This is part of the appeal of such stories whether readers or viewers realize it or not. The story needs to introduce all available clues to the audience — and not hide anything — so that the reader has a chance to figure things out, too. In "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" Poe not only did this, but did so through the narrator themselves, who plays the role of a sidekick in the story, like Holmes' Dr. Watson. In "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" the narrator meets the detective, C. Auguste Dupin. This allows Poe to explain things from Dupin to the narrator, who learns alongside the reader. If this doesn't sound like the most fundamental hallmark of detective fiction, few criteria would.

As far as being "readable" is concerned, an article in Studies in Popular Culture explains that "readable" means that a detective story must strive to be an excellent, understandable detective story, and just that. All other details and nuances come afterward.

Vulture.com

The 10 Best Edgar Allan Poe Adaptations

I n the past few years, director Mike Flanagan has embarked on a spooky adaptation tour of sorts. He tackled Stephen King with Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep , received massive amounts of praise for his treatment of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House , turned Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw into The Haunting of Bly Manor, and even took a stab at young-adult author Christopher Pike’s The Midnight Club . On October 12, Netflix audiences will get to see how he handles Edgar Allan Poe with the miniseries The Fall of the House of Usher .

This latest adaptation is notable due to the sprawling legacy Poe left behind. The author is essentially the first son of American horror and detective literature, and his stories and poems influenced other writers like James and H.P. Lovecraft. Poe’s work has been featured in horror cinema for almost as long as the genre has existed. If you’re looking to experience it onscreen before the upcoming Netflix show, you’re certainly not lacking in the way of solid offerings. From the early silent-film era to our favorite mean yellow family, here are ten adaptations that best exemplify Poe’s revolutionary work in the realm of the macabre.

The Plague in Florence (1919)

Written by Austrian filmmaker Fritz Lang, who went on to direct Metropolis and M , The Plague of Florence adapts Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death . Known for its personification of a plague as a mysterious figure, the short story was first published just a few years after a cholera pandemic tore across the globe claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. Most film adaptations place the story in medieval times, however, and Lang goes one step further with his silent film by rendering the plague as a woman who seems to tempt society as it perishes around her. We’re so consumed by lust and greed, Lang proposes, that death doesn’t even have to prey on us — we simply fall to it.

Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932)

With adaptations of Frankenstein and Dracula , Universal Pictures established itself as the go-to studio for American horror films in the early 1930s, and it would soon include Poe’s work in its stable of shocks with Murders in the Rue Morgue . This wasn’t the first American adaptation of Poe’s work; among others, D.W. Griffith filmed The Tell-Tale Heart in 1914, and the titular Phantom dressed as the Red Death for a bit in Universal’s first Phantom of the Opera film in 1925. Murders of the Rue Morgue , though, capitalizes on Poe at his outlandishly ghoulish best.

Centered on the story of a mad doctor who kidnaps women and injects them with ape blood to create a proper mate for his gorilla henchman, the film expands Poe’s short story about a killer orangutan to give leading man Bela Lugosi more creepy things to do. Fresh off Dracula , Lugosi would soon be shoved into every evil doctor/scientist role Hollywood had to offer, and Rue Morgue captures him at the height of his scenery-chewing aplomb. Director Robert Florey, having been passed over to helm Frankenstein , fills Rue Morgue with touches of German Expressionism, and the movie ends with an ape being shot and falling from a tall building — one year before King Kong .

The Black Cat (1934)

As Rue Morgue made abundantly clear, Poe’s work was ripe for narrative extrapolation. The Black Cat has little to do with his short story of the same title aside from the appearance of a black cat and Poe’s name featuring prominently on the poster. Instead, nestled inside a tale about a mysterious house built in a ruined World War I fort and the plans for revenge that go on there, it provided a chance for Universal Pictures to pit its two horror icons against each other — Lugosi takes on Boris Karloff here with the Frankenstein actor now playing a very effective serial murderer and cult leader.

Though moves Poe’s story outside the context of a man driven mad by a certain kind of cat, it decidedly takes advantage of the author’s consistent emotional thematics. The whole thing reeks of paranoia and of an untrustworthy world looming above to swallow you whole. It even allows Lugosi, who was far more well known for his otherworldly screen presence, to tap into a pathos he was rarely afforded in his career. And Karloff obviously relishes his malice, grinning and puppeteering the emotions of everyone around him just as Poe did with his readers: “Did you hear that, Vitus? The phone is dead. Even the phone is dead .”

The Tell-Tale Heart (1941)

While Universal flooded cinemas with horror films throughout the 1930s (the studio released a third loose Poe adaptation with The Raven in 1935), MGM stuck to its dramas and comedies. Horror had burned it a few times, typically thanks to director Tod Browning, who turned in the controversial Freaks . However, when it did produce horror — like 1941’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (which was nominated for three Academy Awards) — it was something special. This short, faithful adaptation of The Tell-Tale Heart , made to play in theaters before the feature film screened, is often stunning to look at.

Through a concoction of slow zooms and desperate close-ups, the feeling of guilt in the film becomes inescapable. Combined with its excellent sound design, this is a Poe adaptation that thrives purely on the author’s work.

House of Usher (1960)

The most famous Poe adaptations are likely those directed by Roger Corman, who in 1960 was quickly on his way to becoming a B-movie wunderkind. Poe’s stories, already in the public domain, were relatively cheap to adapt even with Corman’s ambitious set designs and the hiring of notable writers like novelist Richard Matheson ( I Am Legend ) to pen the scripts. House of Usher would prove they had major box-office potential, too.

The glue that held Corman’s films together was Vincent Price, a performer who, as Universal honed with Lugosi three decades earlier, could shift between menace and camp with ease. Here, Price taps into the former, playing one sibling in the cursed Usher family who is doomed to sink with his mansion in the death grip of his mad sister. Poe adaptations were generally black-and-white affairs before House of Usher arrived in gorgeous color, perfectly capturing the rotten setting and the bizarre characters who inhabit it.

The Pit and the Pendulum (1961)

In retrospect, House of Usher seems like a warm-up for The Pit and the Pendulum : Matheson returns as the screenwriter, and Price gets even more chances to luxuriate in macabre abandon (he plays two roles!). Corman’s dungeon set pieces are a wonderful combination of construction and matte paintings, and if you came to the theater to see the titular torture device, Corman didn’t disappoint. To match Price, the director hired Barbara Steele, who had starred in Mario Bava’s Black Sunday the year before. Here, she has just as much fun hissing her lines, and as in that landmark Italian film, she gets trapped in a gruesome iron maiden at one point — hey, if it works, it works!

The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

Corman directed eight Poe adaptations from 1960 to 1965, but not all were created equal. Premature Burial ? Without Price, it isn’t much fun. Tales of Terror ? A solid but uninspired collection of short films. Corman’s last true Poe masterpiece was The Masque of the Red Death , a beautiful movie about royal hedonism running amok during what is basically the apocalypse. As Prince Prospero, a Satan-worshipping ruler, Price has little use for humanity and delivers one of the best performances of his career. He is all smirking sadism until, of course, his fate drives him to impotent panic.

There are no giant pendulums or burning castles here, but Corman manages to harness the Poe story’s sheer delirium. This is especially showcased in the scene where corpses, killed by the Red Death at a ball, continue to dance. The director also captured Poe’s criticism of class and the price of unhinged decadence: “Why should you be afraid to die? Your soul has been dead for a long, long time.”

ABC Weekend Special — “The Gold-Bug” (1980)

The length of Poe’s stories made them prime targets for anthology television shows. A version of “The Cask of Amontillado” showed up in a 1949 episode of Suspense (starring Lugosi, who was by then suffering from deteriorating health owing to his drug addiction.) The best of these may be the Daytime Emmy–winning “The Gold-Bug” from ABC Weekend Special . It features a young Anthony Michael Hall in a surprisingly haunting mystery that serves as a kind of coming-of-age story.

Typically trapped under the thumb of his domineering uncle, Hall’s character finds escapism and twisted kinship among outcasts on an island. But he gets mired in trying to understand the secrets of the titular bug and eventually becomes just as obsessed with tales of buried treasure as his questionable allies are. Though this short TV movie is aimed at a young audience, Hall’s performance helps retain the doomed fixations of Poe’s tale.

The Simpsons — “Treehouse of Horror” (1990)

“The Raven” has proved the trickiest of Poe’s works to adapt. Its brevity and the confined setting usually left film versions to their own invention. Out of all things, however, the first Simpsons “Treehouse of Horror” special gave us the most faithful rendition we’re ever likely to see. With narration by James Earl Jones (but Homer as the face of the narrator) and Bart as the confounding Raven, we get a segment that is, oddly enough, less intent on going for laughs and more focused on quoting Poe’s poem in full. It’s funny but also a bit awe inspiring in its dedication.

Masters of Horror — “The Black Cat” (2007)

There are plenty of depictions of Poe himself on film that mix the writer’s biography with the content of his stories, but no actor has been as committed to this as horror staple Jeffrey Combs. Under the direction of Stuart Gordon (who had previously made a just-all-right adaptation of The Pit and the Pendulum ), Combs plays Poe in this Masters of Horror episode as an alcoholic trapped helplessly in his own nightmares, tormented by both a black cat and other visions of death; the episode culminates in hallucinations and disturbing bloodshed. Combs would reprise his role as Poe in a one-man show a few years later, remaining just as fascinated by the author as his critics and fans have been for nearly 200 years.

  • The Fall of the House of Usher Looks Like a Sackler Revenge Romp

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Read stories by Edgar Allan Poe at Poestories.com

The Black Cat

by Edgar Allan Poe (published 1845)

    FOR the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not -- and very surely do I not dream. But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul. My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events. In their consequences, these events have terrified -- have tortured -- have destroyed me. Yet I will not attempt to expound them. To me, they have presented little but Horror -- to many they will seem less terrible than barroques. Hereafter, perhaps, some intellect may be found which will reduce my phantasm to the common-place -- some intellect more calm, more logical, and far less excitable than my own, which will perceive, in the circumstances I detail with awe, nothing more than an ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects.     From my infancy I was noted for the docility and humanity of my disposition. My tenderness of heart was even so conspicuous as to make me the jest of my companions. I was especially fond of animals, and was indulged by my parents with a great variety of pets. With these I spent most of my time, and never was so happy as when feeding and caressing them. This peculiarity of character grew with my growth, and, in my manhood, I derived from it one of my principal sources of pleasure. To those who have cherished an affection for a faithful and sagacious dog, I need hardly be at the trouble of explaining the nature or the intensity of the gratification thus derivable. There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.     I married early, and was happy to find in my wife a disposition not uncongenial with my own. Observing my partiality for domestic pets, she lost no opportunity of procuring those of the most agreeable kind. We had birds, gold-fish, a fine dog, rabbits, a small monkey, and a cat.     This latter was a remarkably large and beautiful animal, entirely black, and sagacious to an astonishing degree. In speaking of his intelligence, my wife, who at heart was not a little tinctured with superstition, made frequent allusion to the ancient popular notion, which regarded all black cats as witches in disguise. Not that she was ever serious upon this point -- and I mention the matter at all for no better reason than that it happens, just now, to be remembered.      Pluto -- this was the cat's name -- was my favorite pet and playmate. I alone fed him, and he attended me wherever I went about the house. It was even with difficulty that I could prevent him from following me through the streets.     Our friendship lasted, in this manner, for several years, during which my general temperament and character -- through the instrumentality of the Fiend Intemperance -- had (I blush to confess it) experienced a radical alteration for the worse. I grew, day by day, more moody, more irritable, more regardless of the feelings of others. I suffered myself to use intemperate language to my wife. At length, I even offered her personal violence. My pets, of course, were made to feel the change in my disposition. I not only neglected, but ill-used them. For Pluto , however, I still retained sufficient regard to restrain me from maltreating him, as I made no scruple of maltreating the rabbits, the monkey, or even the dog, when by accident, or through affection, they came in my way. But my disease grew upon me -- for what disease is like Alcohol ! -- and at length even Pluto , who was now becoming old, and consequently somewhat peevish -- even Pluto began to experience the effects of my ill temper.     One night, returning home, much intoxicated, from one of my haunts about town, I fancied that the cat avoided my presence. I seized him; when, in his fright at my violence, he inflicted a slight wound upon my hand with his teeth. The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My  original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame. I took from my waistcoat-pocket a pen-knife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket ! I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity.     When reason returned with the morning -- when I had slept off the fumes of the night's debauch -- I experienced a sentiment half of horror, half of remorse, for the crime of which I had been guilty; but it was, at best, a feeble and equivocal feeling, and the soul remained untouched. I again plunged into excess, and soon drowned in wine all memory of the deed.     In the meantime the cat slowly recovered. The socket of the lost eye presented, it is true, a frightful appearance, but he no longer appeared to suffer any pain. He went about the house as usual, but, as might be expected, fled in extreme terror at my approach. I had so much of my old heart left, as to be at first grieved by this evident dislike on the part of a creature which had once so loved me. But this feeling soon gave place to irritation. And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of PERVERSENESS. Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart -- one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not ? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such? This spirit of perverseness, I say, came to my final overthrow. It was this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself -- to offer violence to its own nature -- to do wrong for the wrong's sake only -- that urged me to continue and finally to consummate the injury I had inflicted upon the unoffending brute. One morning, in cool blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree; -- hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at my heart; -- hung it because I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offence; -- hung it because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin -- a deadly sin that would so jeopardize my immortal soul as to place it -- if such a thing were possible -- even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God.     On the night of the day on which this cruel deed was done, I was aroused from sleep by the cry of fire. The curtains of my bed were in flames. The whole house was blazing. It was with great difficulty that my wife, a servant, and myself, made our escape from the conflagration . The destruction was complete. My entire worldly wealth was swallowed up, and I resigned myself thenceforward to despair.     I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity. But I am detailing a chain of facts -- and wish not to leave even a possible link imperfect. On the day succeeding the fire, I visited the ruins. The walls, with one exception, had fallen in. This exception was found in a compartment wall, not very thick, which stood about the middle of the house, and against which had rested the head of my bed. The plastering had here, in great measure, resisted the action of the fire -- a fact which I attributed to its having been recently spread. About this wall a dense crowd were collected, and many persons seemed to be examining a particular portion of it with very minute and eager attention. The words "strange!" "singular!" and other similar expressions, excited my curiosity. I approached and saw, as if graven in bas relief upon the white surface, the figure of a gigantic cat . The impression was given with an accuracy truly marvellous. There was a rope about the animal's neck.     When I first beheld this apparition -- for I could scarcely regard it as less -- my wonder and my terror were extreme. But at length reflection came to my aid. The cat, I remembered, had been hung in a garden adjacent to the house. Upon the alarm of fire, this garden had been immediately filled by the crowd -- by some one of whom the animal must have been cut from the tree and thrown, through an open window, into my chamber. This had probably been done with the view of arousing me from sleep. The falling of other walls had compressed the victim of my cruelty into the substance of the freshly-spread plaster; the lime of which, with the flames, and the ammonia from the carcass, had then accomplished the portraiture as I saw it.     Although I thus readily accounted to my reason, if not altogether to my conscience, for the startling fact just detailed, it did not the less fail to make a deep impression upon my fancy. For months I could not rid myself of the phantasm of the cat; and, during this period, there came back into my spirit a half-sentiment that seemed, but was not, remorse. I went so far as to regret the loss of the animal, and to look about me, among the vile haunts which I now habitually frequented, for another pet of the same species, and of somewhat similar appearance, with which to supply its place.     One night as I sat, half stupified, in a den of more than infamy, my attention was suddenly drawn to some black object, reposing upon the head of one of the immense hogsheads of Gin, or of Rum, which constituted the chief furniture of the apartment. I had been looking steadily at the top of this hogshead for some minutes, and what now caused me surprise was the fact that I had not sooner perceived the object thereupon. I approached it, and touched it with my hand. It was a black cat -- a very large one -- fully as large as Pluto , and closely resembling him in every respect but one. Pluto had not a white hair upon any portion of his body; but this cat had a large, although indefinite splotch of white, covering nearly the whole region of the breast.     Upon my touching him, he immediately arose, purred loudly, rubbed against my hand, and appeared delighted with my notice. This, then, was the very creature of which I was in search. I at once offered to purchase it of the landlord; but this person made no claim to it -- knew nothing of it -- had never seen it before.     I continued my caresses, and, when I prepared to go home, the animal evinced a disposition to accompany me. I permitted it to do so; occasionally stooping and patting it as I proceeded. When it reached the house it domesticated itself at once, and became immediately a great favorite with my wife.     For my own part, I soon found a dislike to it arising within me. This was just the reverse of what I had anticipated; but -- I know not how or why it was -- its evident fondness for myself rather disgusted and annoyed. By slow degrees, these feelings of disgust and annoyance rose into the bitterness of hatred. I avoided the creature; a certain sense of shame, and the remembrance of my former deed of cruelty, preventing me from physically abusing it. I did not, for some weeks, strike, or otherwise violently ill use it; but gradually -- very gradually -- I came to look upon it with unutterable loathing, and to flee silently from its odious presence, as from the breath of a pestilence.     What added, no doubt, to my hatred of the beast, was the discovery, on the morning after I brought it home, that, like Pluto , it also had been deprived of one of its eyes. This circumstance, however, only endeared it to my wife, who, as I have already said, possessed, in a high degree, that humanity of feeling which had once been my distinguishing trait, and the source of many of my simplest and purest pleasures.     With my aversion to this cat, however, its partiality for myself seemed to increase. It followed my footsteps with a pertinacity which it would be difficult to make the reader comprehend. Whenever I sat, it would crouch beneath my chair, or spring upon my knees, covering me with its loathsome caresses. If I arose to walk it would get between my feet and thus nearly throw me down, or, fastening its long and sharp claws in my dress, clamber, in this manner, to my breast. At such times, although I longed to destroy it with a blow, I was yet withheld from so doing, partly by a memory of my former crime, but chiefly -- let me confess it at once -- by absolute dread of the beast.     This dread was not exactly a dread of physical evil -- and yet I should be at a loss how otherwise to define it. I am almost ashamed to own -- yes, even in this felon's cell, I am almost ashamed to own -- that the terror and horror with which the animal inspired me, had been heightened by one of the merest chimæras it would be possible to conceive. My wife had called my attention, more than once, to the character of the mark of white hair, of which I have spoken, and which constituted the sole visible difference between the strange beast and the one I had destroyed. The reader will remember that this mark, although large, had been originally very indefinite; but, by slow degrees -- degrees nearly imperceptible, and which for a long time my Reason struggled to reject as fanciful -- it had, at length, assumed a rigorous distinctness of outline. It was now the representation of an object that I shudder to name -- and for this, above all, I loathed, and dreaded, and would have rid myself of the monster had I dared -- it was now, I say, the image of a hideous -- of a ghastly thing -- of the GALLOWS ! -- oh, mournful and terrible engine of Horror and of Crime -- of Agony and of Death !     And now was I indeed wretched beyond the wretchedness of mere Humanity. And a brute beast -- whose fellow I had contemptuously destroyed -- a brute beast to work out for me -- for me a man, fashioned in the image of the High God -- so much of insufferable wo! Alas! neither by day nor by night knew I the blessing of Rest any more! During the former the creature left me no moment alone; and, in the latter, I started, hourly, from dreams of unutterable fear, to find the hot breath of the thing upon my face, and its vast weight -- an incarnate Night-Mare that I had no power to shake off -- incumbent eternally upon my heart !     Beneath the pressure of torments such as these, the feeble remnant of the good within me succumbed. Evil thoughts became my sole intimates -- the darkest and most evil of thoughts. The moodiness of my usual temper increased to hatred of all things and of all mankind; while, from the sudden, frequent, and ungovernable outbursts of a fury to which I now blindly abandoned myself, my uncomplaining wife, alas! was the most usual and the most patient of sufferers.     One day she accompanied me, upon some household errand, into the cellar of the old building which our poverty compelled us to inhabit. The cat followed me down the steep stairs, and, nearly throwing me headlong, exasperated me to madness. Uplifting an axe, and forgetting, in my wrath, the childish dread which had hitherto stayed my hand, I aimed a blow at the animal which, of course, would have proved instantly fatal had it descended as I wished. But this blow was arrested by the hand of my wife. Goaded, by the interference, into a rage more than demoniacal, I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain. She fell dead upon the spot, without a groan.     This hideous murder accomplished, I set myself forthwith, and with entire deliberation, to the task of concealing the body. I knew that I could not remove it from the house, either by day or by night, without the risk of being observed by the neighbors. Many projects entered my mind. At one period I thought of cutting the corpse into minute fragments, and destroying them by fire. At another, I resolved to dig a grave for it in the floor of the cellar. Again, I deliberated about casting it in the well in the yard -- about packing it in a box, as if merchandize, with the usual arrangements, and so getting a porter to take it from the house. Finally I hit upon what I considered a far better expedient than either of these. I determined to wall it up in the cellar -- as the monks of the middle ages are recorded to have walled up their victims.     For a purpose such as this the cellar was well adapted. Its walls were loosely constructed, and had lately been plastered throughout with a rough plaster, which the dampness of the atmosphere had prevented from hardening. Moreover, in one of the walls was a projection, caused by a false chimney, or fireplace, that had been filled up, and made to resemble the rest of the cellar. I made no doubt that I could readily displace the bricks at this point, insert the corpse, and wall the whole up as before, so that no eye could detect any thing suspicious.     And in this calculation I was not deceived. By means of a crow-bar I easily dislodged the bricks, and, having carefully deposited the body against the inner wall, I propped it in that position, while, with little trouble, I re-laid the whole structure as it originally stood. Having procured mortar, sand, and hair, with every possible precaution, I prepared a plaster which could not be distinguished from the old, and with this I very carefully went over the new brick-work. When I had finished, I felt satisfied that all was right. The wall did not present the slightest appearance of having been disturbed. The rubbish on the floor was picked up with the minutest care. I looked around triumphantly, and said to myself -- "Here at least, then, my labor has not been in vain."     My next step was to look for the beast which had been the cause of so much wretchedness; for I had, at length, firmly resolved to put it to death. Had I been able to meet with it, at the moment, there could have been no doubt of its fate; but it appeared that the crafty animal had been alarmed at the violence of my previous anger, and forebore to present itself in my present mood. It is impossible to describe, or to imagine, the deep, the blissful sense of relief which the absence of the detested creature occasioned in my bosom. It did not make its appearance during the night -- and thus for one night at least, since its introduction into the house, I soundly and tranquilly slept; aye, slept even with the burden of murder upon my soul!     The second and the third day passed, and still my tormentor came not. Once again I breathed as a freeman. The monster, in terror, had fled the premises forever! I should behold it no more! My happiness was supreme! The guilt of my dark deed disturbed me but little. Some few inquiries had been made, but these had been readily answered. Even a search had been instituted -- but of course nothing was to be discovered. I looked upon my future felicity as secured.     Upon the fourth day of the assassination, a party of the police came, very unexpectedly, into the house, and proceeded again to make rigorous investigation of the premises. Secure, however, in the inscrutability of my place of concealment, I felt no embarrassment whatever. The officers bade me accompany them in their search. They left no nook or corner unexplored. At length, for the third or fourth time, they descended into the cellar. I quivered not in a muscle. My heart beat calmly as that of one who slumbers in innocence. I walked the cellar from end to end. I folded my arms upon my bosom, and roamed easily to and fro. The police were thoroughly satisfied and prepared to depart. The glee at my heart was too strong to be restrained. I burned to say if but one word, by way of triumph, and to render doubly sure their assurance of my guiltlessness.     "Gentlemen," I said at last, as the party ascended the steps, "I delight to have allayed your suspicions. I wish you all health, and a little more courtesy. By the bye, gentlemen, this -- this is a very well constructed house." (In the rabid desire to say something easily, I scarcely knew what I uttered at all.) -- "I may say an excellently well constructed house. These walls -- are you going, gentlemen? -- these walls are solidly put together;" and here, through the mere phrenzy of bravado, I rapped heavily, with a cane which I held in my hand, upon that very portion of the brick-work behind which stood the corpse of the wife of my bosom.     But may God shield and deliver me from the fangs of the Arch-Fiend ! No sooner had the reverberation of my blows sunk into silence, than I was answered by a voice from within the tomb! -- by a cry, at first muffled and broken, like the sobbing of a child, and then quickly swelling into one long, loud, and continuous scream, utterly anomalous and inhuman -- a howl -- a wailing shriek, half of horror and half of triumph, such as might have arisen only out of hell, conjointly from the throats of the dammed in their agony and of the demons that exult in the damnation.     Of my own thoughts it is folly to speak. Swooning, I staggered to the opposite wall. For one instant the party upon the stairs remained motionless, through extremity of terror and of awe. In the next, a dozen stout arms were toiling at the wall. It fell bodily. The corpse, already greatly decayed and clotted with gore, stood erect before the eyes of the spectators. Upon its head, with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman. I had walled the monster up within the tomb!

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  1. Edgar Allan Poe

  2. The Stories of Edgar Allen Poe: The Tell

  3. Six Creepy Stories by Edgar Allan Poe

  4. Edgar Allan Poe ~ “Years of love have been forgot, In the hatred of a minute.” #quotes #lifequotes

  5. Miscellaneous Poe: Poems and Short Stories by Edgar Allan Poe

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COMMENTS

  1. 10 of the Best Edgar Allan Poe Stories Everyone Should Read

    10. ' The Balloon-Hoax '. Published in 1844 and originally presented as a true story in The Sun newspaper in New York, 'The Balloon-Hoax' tells of a European man's journey across the Atlantic in a hot-air balloon. The journey supposedly took him only three days - which would have been a remarkable feat, if true. It wasn't.

  2. Exploring the 10 Most Famous Works of Edgar Allan Poe

    The most eerie and memorable of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories is " The Fall of the House of Usher ". As it describes the sad downfall of the Usher family, it submerges readers in a realm of gothic terror.

  3. Ranking The 10 Best Edgar Allan Poe Stories

    1. "The Tell-Tale Heart" One of his shortest stories, this is the quintessential Poe story in many ways. It concisely showcases his recurring elements of guilt, paranoia, murder, and unnamed narrators rationalizing their actions.

  4. Edgar Allan Poe's 10 Best Stories

    / 29 October 2015 If Edgar Allan Poe — and his writing — has not aged well and seems more than a little passé for 21st century sensibilities, it's not entirely his fault. Like others who have...

  5. 10 Essential Edgar Allan Poe Short Stories

    1. "The Tell-Tale Heart" Is it a crime story? A horror tale? It's both, of course, and it's also a chilling masterpiece that finds Poe brilliantly prowling the murky boundary between obsession...

  6. Stories by Edgar Allan Poe

    "Berenice" (1835) Horror story about teeth "The Black Cat" (1845) Horror story about a cat "The Cask of Amontillado" (1846) A story of revenge "A Descent Into The Maelstrom" (1845) Man vs. Nature, Adventure Story "Eleonora" (1850) A love story "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (1845) Talking with a dead man

  7. Category:Short stories by Edgar Allan Poe

    The Gold-Bug H Hop-Frog I The Imp of the Perverse L Ligeia The Light-House Loss of Breath M The Man of the Crowd The Man That Was Used Up The Masque of the Red Death Metzengerstein

  8. Edgar Allan Poe

    October 7, 1849, Baltimore, Maryland (aged 40) Awards And Honors: Hall of Fame (1910) Notable Works: "Annabel Lee" "Eleonora" "Eureka"

  9. The 25 Best Edgar Allan Poe Stories

    24. "Morella" (1835) Image via Complex Original Ever find yourself growing tired of the person you're in love with? When this story's narrator first met his wife, Morella, his heart "burned...

  10. Best Edgar Allan Poe Stories

    "The Black Cat," "The Fall of the House of Usher, "The Sphinx," "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and "The Tell-Tale Heart." Cast your votes for the best Edgar Allan Poe stories below - stories written by one of the best short story writers and best crime authors of all time. 1 103 votes The Tell-Tale Heart 1843, The Pioneer Amazon 2 89 votes

  11. 18 Best Stories by Edgar Allan Poe

    About Edgar Allan Poe. Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, USA, in 1809. Poe, short story writer, editor and critic, he is best known for his macabre tales and as the progenitor of the detective story. He died in 1849, in mysterious circumstances, at… More about Edgar Allan Poe

  12. Edgar Allan Poe, short stories, tales, and poems

    Poe wrote quite a few gothic stories about murder, revenge, torture, the plague, being buried alive, and insanity. Many modern books and movies have "borrowed" ideas from Poe. Some of Poe's stories were not well accepted in his day because people were just not ready for them- they were too scary.

  13. The Best Short Stories of Edgar Allan Poe

    The Best Short Stories of Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe 4.21 4,905 ratings153 reviews This volume contains a collection of some of the best short stories ever written by Edgar Allan Poe. A master of the macabre, Poe exhibits his literary prowess in these classic short stories.

  14. 18 Best Stories by Edgar Allan Poe

    The Black Cat - The Fall of the House of Usher - The Masque of the Red Death - The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar - The Premature Burial - Ms. Found in a Bottle - A Tale of the Ragged Mountains - The Sphinx - The Murders in the Rue Morgue - The Tell-Tale Heart - The Gold-Bug - The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether - The Man That Was Used Up ...

  15. The Angel of the Odd by Edgar Allan Poe

    by Edgar Allan Poe(published 1844) AN EXTRAVAGANZA. IT was a chilly November afternoon. I had just consummated an unusually hearty dinner, of which the dyspeptic truffe formed not the least important item, and was sitting alone in the dining-room, with my feet upon the fender, and at my elbow a small table which I had rolled up to the fire, and ...

  16. A brief survey of the short story, part 55: Edgar Allan Poe

    Poe's genius in William Wilson is to tell the story not of a good protagonist bedevilled by an evil twin, but of a corrupt man tormented by a vision of his better self. How like our own internal ...

  17. 20 Best Edgar Allan Poe Stories and Poems

    1. Alone "From childhood's hour, I have not been / As others were—I have not seen / As others saw," Poe writes in the poem "Alone." Lesser known than many of his longer poems or gothic short stories, "Alone" offers us a look into Poe's obsession with the macabre from a young age.

  18. 10 Best Stories by Edgar Allan Poe

    Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic who pioneered the detective fiction genre and helped popularize short stories. He is best known for his Gothic and macabre themes and dark romanticism style. Poe's literary works have had a profound impact on American and international literature. Here are 10 of Poe's ...

  19. The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe

    The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe (published 1843) TRUE! -- nervous -- very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses -- not destroyed -- not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth.

  20. Poe's Short Stories: Character List

    "The Fall of the House of Usher" Roderick Usher The owner of the mansion and last male in the Usher line. Roderick functions as a doppelganger, or character double, for his twin sister, Madeline. He represents the mind to her body and suffers from the mental counterpart of her physical illness. Read an in-depth analysis of Roderick Usher

  21. The Raven illustrated by Gustave Dor�: and A Selection of Short Tales

    Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer and literary critic who lived from 1809 to 1849. He is best known for his dark and mysterious short stories and poems, and is often considered a master of the macabre. Poe's first collection of poems, "Tamerlane and Other Poems," was published in 1827.

  22. The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe

    The Fall of the House of Usher. by Edgar Allan Poe. (published 1839) Son coeur est un luth suspendu; Sitot qu'on le touche il resonne. - De Beranger. DURING the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly ...

  23. The Surprisingly Overlooked Detail About Edgar Allan Poe's Writing

    No one was perusing shelves at a local Barnes & Noble and looking for the latest eye-catching young adult novel cover. In fact, Poe was so ahead of the curve that in addition to pioneering the detective novel and some gloriously macabre fiction, he was also arguably the "architect" of the modern short story, itself (per Poets.org). Bear in mind ...

  24. The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe

    The wine sparkled in his eyes and the bells jingled. My own fancy grew warm with the Medoc. We had passed through long walls of piled skeletons, with casks and puncheons intermingling, into the inmost recesses of the catacombs. I paused again, and this time I made bold to seize Fortunato by an arm above the elbow.

  25. The 10 Best Edgar Allan Poe Adaptations

    The Black Cat (1934). As Rue Morgue made abundantly clear, Poe's work was ripe for narrative extrapolation.The Black Cat has little to do with his short story of the same title aside from the ...

  26. The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe

    by Edgar Allan Poe. (published 1845) FOR the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not -- and very surely do I not dream. But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul.