The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales [Paperback]

Classic tales of mystery, terror, imagination, and suspense from the celebrated master of the macabre.

This volume gathers together fourteen of Edgar Allan Poe's richest and most influential tales, including: “The Pit and the Pendulum,” his reimagining of Inquisition tortures; “The Tell-Tale Heart,” an exploration of a murderer’s madness, which Stephen King called “the best tale of inside evil ever written”; “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Poe’s tour de force about a family doomed by a grim bloodline curse; and his pioneering detective stories, “The Purloined Letter” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” featuring a rational investigator with a poetic soul. Also included is Poe’s only full-length novel,Narrative of A. Gordon Pym.
 
With an Introduction by Stephen Marlowe
and an Afterword by Regina Marler“Poe was so good at writing stories that exploited the unspoken horrors of his day.”—Chuck PalahniukEdgar Allan Poe(1809–1949) received a good education, first in England, then in a private school at Richmond, and later spent a year at the University of Virginia before he ran away to enlist in the army. Between 1827 and 1831, he published three volumes of poetry:Tamerlane(1827),Al Aaraaf(1829), andPoems(1831). From 1831 to 1835, he lived in Baltimore, where he began a lifelong struggle with poverty, disappointments in love, and addiction to alcohol. This last defect made it impossible for him to retain the editorial positions he later secured on magazines in Richmond, Philadelphia, and New York, despite the fact that the tales and book reviews he contributed greatly increased circulation. In May 1836, he married Virginia Clemm, a child of thirteen and the daughter of a paternal aunt. In April 1844, he moved his family to New York, and in January of the following yearl3ã