The Works of Edgar Allan Poe Volume 4

by Edgar Allan Poe

Overview

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is one of America's greatest and most dark and mysterious writers. The circumstances surrounding his untimely death are still unknown, as is what made him tick. Part of the American Romantic Movement, Poe is best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, and Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story. Long before Sherlock Holmes became famous, Poe invented the genre of detective fiction and contributed to science fiction. Poe and his works influenced literature in the United States and around the world, as well as in specialized fields, such as cosmology and cryptography. Poe and his work appear throughout popular culture in literature, music, films, and television today, and the NFL's Baltimore Ravens got their name from his most famous poem. Poe's best known fiction works are Gothic, a genre he followed to appease the public taste. His most recurring themes deal with questions of death, including its physical signs, the effects of decomposition, concerns of premature burial, the reanimation of the dead, and mourning. Many of his works are generally considered part of the dark romanticism genre, a literary reaction to transcendentalism, which Poe strongly disliked.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781502370402
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	09/14/2014
Pages:	166
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.35(d)

About the Author

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was orphaned at the age of three and adopted by a wealthy Virginia family with whom he had a troubled relationship. He excelled in his studies of language and literature at school, and self-published his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, in 1827. In 1830, Poe embarked on a career as a writer and began contributing reviews and essays to popular periodicals. He also wrote sketches and short fiction, and in 1833 published his only completed novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Over the next five years he established himself as a master of the short story form through the publication of "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Masque of the Red Death," "The Tell-Tale Heart," and other well–known works. In 1841, he wrote "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," generally considered the first modern detective story. The publication of The Raven and Other Poems in 1845 brought him additional fame as a poet.

Read an Excerpt

PHILOSOPHY OF FURNITURE IN the internal decoration, if not in the external architecture of their residences, the English are supreme. The Italians have but little sentiment beyond marbles and colors. In France, meliora probant, deteriora sequuntur — the people are too much a race of gad-abouts to maintain those household proprieties of which, indeed, they have a delicate appreciation, or at least the elements of a proper sense. The Chinese and most of the Eastern races have a warm but inappropriate fancy. The Scotch are poor decorists. The Dutch have, perhaps, an indeterminate idea that a curtain is not a cabbage. In Spain they are all curtains — a nation of hangmen. The Russians do not furnish. The Hottentots and Kickapoos are very well in their way. The Yankees alone are preposterous. How this happens, it is not difficult to see. We have no aristocracy of blood, and having therefore, as a natural, and indeed as an inevitable thing, fashioned for ourselves an aristocracy of dollars, the display of wealth has here to take the place and perform the office of the heraldic display in monarchical countries. By a transition readily understood, and which might have been as readily foreseen, we have been brought to merge in simple show our notions of taste itself. To speak less abstractly. In England, for example, no mere parade of costly appurtenances would be so likely as with us to create an impression of the beautiful in respect to the appurtenances themselves, or of taste as regards the proprietor; this for the reason, first, that wealth is not, in England, the loftiest object of ambition as constituting a nobility; and secondly, that there the true nobility of blood,confining itself within the strict limits of legitimate taste, rather avoids than affects that mere costlin...

Table of Contents

THE DEVIL IN THE BELFRY

LIONIZING

X-ING A PARAGRAPH

METZENGERSTEIN

THE SYSTEM OF DOCTOR TARR AND PROFESSOR FETHER

THE LITERARY LIFE OF THINGUM BOB, ESQ.

HOW TO WRITE A BLACKWOOD ARTICLE.

A PREDICAMENT

MYSTIFICATION

DIDDLING

THE ANGEL OF THE ODD

MELLONTA TAUTA

THE DUC DE L’OMELETTE.

THE OBLONG BOX.

LOSS OF BREATH

THE MAN THAT WAS USED UP.

THE BUSINESS MAN

THE LANDSCAPE GARDEN

MAELZEL’S CHESS-PLAYER

THE POWER OF WORDS

THE COLLOQUY OF MONOS AND UNA

THE CONVERSATION OF EIROS AND CHARMION

SHADOW—A PARABLE