These stories and poems come from the mind of one of the earliest masters of macabre literature. From the mysterious to the macabre, the works of Edgar Allan Poe have the power to evoke readers’ deepest emotions. Poe’s stories and poems explore the darker side of life and still offer lessons and insight into human behavior today. This Word Cloud edition presents many of Poe’s best-known works, including “The Raven,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” along with dozens of other short stories and poems.

This new selection of 24 tales places the most popular--"The Fall of the House of Usher", "The Masque of the Red Death", "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", and "The Purloined Letter"--alongside less well-known travel narratives, metaphysical essays, and political satires.

Part of the Legend Classics series Sleep, those little slices of death — how I loathe them. Behold: a selection of short stories from the master of the macabre, Edgar Allen Poe. From the brilliant mind of a man responsible for popularising the genres of detective fiction and science fiction come these unforgettable tales of death, decay and the dark depths of human emotion. They will, almost inevitably, crawl under your skin and into your brain. The Legend Classics series: Around the World in Eighty Days The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn The Importance of Being Earnest Alice's Adventures in Wonderland The Metamorphosis The Railway Children The Hound of the Baskervilles Frankenstein Wuthering Heights Three Men in a Boat The Time Machine Little Women Anne of Green Gables The Jungle Book The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories Dracula A Study in Scarlet Leaves of Grass The Secret Garden The War of the Worlds A Christmas Carol Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Heart of Darkness The Scarlet Letter This Side of Paradise Oliver Twist The Picture of Dorian Gray Treasure Island The Turn of the Screw The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Emma The Trial A Selection of Short Stories by Edgar Allan Poe Grimm Fairy Tales The Awakening Mrs Dalloway Gulliver’s Travels The Castle of Otranto Silas Marner Hard Times

A new selection for the NEA’s Big Read program A compact selection of Poe’s greatest stories and poems, chosen by the National Endowment for the Arts for their Big Read program. This selection of eleven stories and seven poems contains such famously chilling masterpieces of the storyteller’s art as “The Tell-tale Heart,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and such unforgettable poems as “The Raven,” “The Bells,” and “Annabel Lee.” Poe is widely credited with pioneering the detective story, represented here by “The Purloined Letter,” “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Also included is his essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” in which he lays out his theory of how good writers write, describing how he constructed “The Raven” as an example.

About Author The works of American author Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 - October 7, 1849) include many poems, short stories, and one novel. His fiction spans multiple genres, including horror fiction, adventure, science fiction, and detective fiction, a genre he is credited with inventing. These works are generally considered part of the Dark romanticism movement, a literary reaction to Transcendentalism. Poe's writing reflects his literary theories: he disagreed with didacticism[3] and allegory. Meaning in literature, he said in his criticism, should be an undercurrent just beneath the surface; works whose meanings are too obvious cease to be art. Poe pursued originality in his works, and disliked proverbs.He often included elements of popular pseudosciences such as phrenology and physiognomy.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. Though known as a masterly practitioner of Gothic fiction, Poe did not invent the genre; he was following a long-standing popular tradition.Poe's literary career began in 1827 with the release of 50 copies of Tamerlane and Other Poems credited only to "a Bostonian", a collection of early poems that received virtually no attention. In December 1829, Poe released Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems in Baltimore before delving into short stories for the first time with "Metzengerstein" in 1832.His most successful and most widely read prose during his lifetime was "The Gold-Bug", which earned him a $100 prize, the most money he received for a single work. One of his most important works, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", was published in 1841 and is today considered the first modern detective story.Poe called it a "tale of ratiocination".Poe became a household name with the publication of "The Raven" in 1845, though it was not a financial success. The publishing industry at the time was a difficult career choice and much of Poe's work was written using themes specifically catered for mass market tastes.

The Portable Edgar Allan Poe compiles Poe's greatest writings: tales of fantasy, terror, death, revenge, murder, and mystery, including "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Masque of the Red Death," and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," the world's first detective story. In addition, this volume offers letters, articles, criticism, visionary poetry, and a selection of random "opinions" on fancy and the imagination, music and poetry, intuition and sundry other topics. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.