Gathers Poe's poems, tales, and sketches, along with his longer works of fiction and essays on poetry and literature, and offers a chronology of his life and information on his work.

Gathers Poe's poems, tales, and sketches, along with his longer works of fiction and essays on poetry and literature, and offers a chronology of his life and information on his work.

Gathers Poe's essays on the theory of poetry, the art of fiction, the role of the critic, leading nineteenth-century writers, and the New York literary world.

Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 - October 7, 1849) was an American author and poet, and is considered part of the American Romantic Movement. He was best known for his tales of the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective-fiction genre. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.

This beautiful volume showcases the full range of Poe's genius--from "The Raven" and terrifying tales like "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Fall of the House of Usher," and "The Masque of the Red Death," to humorous sketches, the very first detective stories, early works of science fiction, and literary criticism.

Edgar Allan Poe’s stories and poems are among the most haunting and indelible in American literature, but critics for decades persisted in seeing Poe as an anomaly, or even an anachronism. His works, with their bizarrely motivated characters and mysterious settings, did not seem to be a part of the literature of early nineteenth-century America. Critics realize now, though, that Poe was even more a part of the contemporary American literary scene than many of his more “nationalistic” peers, and that in much of his work Poe was making commentaries on slavery and Southern social attitudes, technology, the urban landscape, political economy, and other subjects. This Broadview Edition includes a selection of Poe’s poems, tales, and sketches in such diverse modes of writing as tales of the supernatural and psychic conflict, satires and hoaxes, science fiction and detective fiction, and nonfiction essays on literary and social topics. These are supplemented by a selection of contextual documents—newspaper and magazine articles, treatises, and other historical texts—that will help readers understand the social, literary, and intellectual milieus in which Poe wrote.