Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was an American poet, critic, editor and fiction writer whose tales helped shape modern horror, detective fiction and psychological suspense. Born in Boston and raised partly in Virginia, he worked in magazine culture and repeatedly turned poverty, bereavement, addiction and intellectual extremity into literary material. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is his only completed novel.
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket begins as a sea adventure told by a young Nantucketer whose craving for forbidden experience repeatedly overrides judgment. Pym and his friend Augustus Barnard first make a disastrous drunken voyage in the Ariel, a small boat nearly destroyed before rescue.
This selection gathers six of Edgar Allan Poe's best-known tales, two of them detective stories and four of them tales of terror, written between 1839 and 1846 and printed here from the Raven Edition of his works. The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) opens with an essay on the analytical mind and introduces C. Auguste Dupin, a poor but brilliant Parisian gentleman who shares lodgings with the unnamed narrator.
The Raven is a narrative poem of eighteen six-line stanzas in which a grieving student, alone at midnight in December, is visited by a talking bird that can say only one word. It appeared in the New York Evening Mirror on 29 January 1845, ahead of its printing in The American Review, and made Poe famous almost overnight.
