Fiction · 1839
The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 2
Twenty-two of Poe's own stories, spanning nearly the whole range of what he invented or perfected: the detective story ("The Purloined Letter"), the psychological horror tale ("The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Black Cat," "The Tell-Tale Heart"), the tale of live burial and mortal dread ("The Premature Burial," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar"), and the doppelgänger story that has haunted fiction ever since ("William Wilson"). Collected here as the second volume of the posthumous "Raven Edition" of Poe's complete works, this is the volume built around his short fiction rather than his poetry — the tales that made him, more than any other single writer, the architect of the modern short story.
This Raven Edition volume was first assembled after Poe's death, drawing on the text and notes of his one-time literary executor, Rufus Griswold, whose own endnotes are preserved alongside Poe's.
This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text of all twenty-two stories, together with the volume's own endnotes.
Contents
- Note
- The Purloined Letter
- The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade
- A Descent Into the Maelström
- Von Kempelen and His Discovery
- Mesmeric Revelation
- The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
- The Black Cat
- The Fall of the House of Usher
- Silence—A Fable
- The Masque of the Red Death
- The Cask of Amontillado
- The Imp of the Perverse
- The Island of the Fay
- The Assignation
- The Pit and the Pendulum
- The Premature Burial
- The Domain of Arnheim
- Landor’s Cottage
- William Wilson
- The Tell-Tale Heart
- Berenice
- Eleonora
- Notes to the Second Volume
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the author
1809–1849 · Romantic
Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was born in Boston to travelling actors who both died before he was three; raised in Richmond, Virginia by the merchant John Allan (whose name he took as his middle name but who never formally adopted him), he attended the University of Virginia and West Point before a permanent break with his foster father left him to support himself entirely by writing and editing, at a time when American magazines paid little and copyright piracy from Britain made a living wage still harder to earn. He worked as an editor for several Southern and Northern literary magazines, raising their circulation sharply through his own fiction, poetry, and notoriously exacting criticism, while publishing "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839), "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841, generally credited as the first modern detective story), and "The Raven" (1845), which made him a household name overnight but earned him only a few dollars. He married his young cousin Virginia Clemm in 1836; her long illness and death from tuberculosis in 1847 devastated him. He died in Baltimore at forty, in circumstances never fully explained, days after being found in distress on the street; his literary rival Rufus Griswold, appointed his literary executor, published a hostile obituary and memoir that shaped Poe's public image as a dissolute figure for decades afterward, notwithstanding Griswold's own fabrications.
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