Tales of Mystery and Imagination

Edgar Allan Poe

Description

This fantastic volume contains a collection of some of Edgar Allen Poe’s most famous tales, including: “The Gold-Bug”, “Ms. Found in a Bottle”, “A Descent into the Maelström”, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, “William Wilson”, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, “The Mystery of Marie Roget”, “The Pitt and the Pendulum”, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains”, and more. A must-have for fans of the macabre, and would make for a fantastic addition to any collection. Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was an American author, editor, poet, and critic. Most famous for his stories of mystery and horror, he was one of the first American short story writers, and is widely considered to be the inventor of the detective fiction genre. We are republishing "Tales of Mystery and Imagination” now in a high-quality edition complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.

Sujets

• Horror Stories

Informations

• Publié par: Read Books Ltd.
• Date de parution: 14 juillet 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781528761055
• Langue: English

Extrait

TALES OF MYSTERY AND IMAGINATION
BY
EDGAR ALLAN POE
Copyright 2013 Read Books Ltd. This book is copyright and may not be reproduced or copied in any way without the express permission of the publisher in writing
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
CONTENTS
EDGAR ALLAN POE
INTRODUCTION
I - THE GOLD-BUG
II - MS. FOUND IN A BOTTLE
III - A DESCENT INTO THE MAELSTR M
IV - THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER
V - WILLIAM WILSON
VI - THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE
VII - THE MYSTERY OF MARIE ROG T*
VIII - THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM
IX - THE TELL-TALE HEART
X - A TALE OF THE RAGGED MOUNTAINS
XI - THE PREMATURE BURIAL
XII - THE SYSTEM OF DOCTOR TARR AND PROFESSOR FETHER
XIII - THE CASK OF AMONTILLADO
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1809. He was left an orphan at a very young age, following the abscondence of his father and subsequent death of his mother, but was taken in by a couple from Richmond, Virginia. After a brief spell living in England and Scotland, Poe enrolled at the newly-established University of Virginia. However, after just one semester, having become estranged from his foster father due to gambling debts, and finding himself unable to fund his studies, he dropped out. In 1827, aged 18, Poe travelled back to Boston, the city of his birth.
By now in severe financial trouble, Poe lied about his age in order to enlist in the army. After spending two years posted to South Carolina, and having failed as an officer s cadet at West Point, Poe left the military by getting deliberately court-martialled. He left for New York in 1831, where he released his third collection of poems, the first two having received almost zero attention. Not long after its publication, in March of 1831, Poe returned to Baltimore.
From 1831 onwards, Poe began in earnest to try and make a living as a writer, and turned from poetry to prose. Despite often finding himself penniless, and frequently having to move city to stay in employment as a critic, during the thirties and forties Poe published a good amount of fiction. Most of his best known short-stories, such as The Tell Tale Heart, Ligeia , William Wilson and The Fall of the House of Usher , were published between 1835 and 1845. In January 1845, Poe published his poem The Raven , which - despite fact that he only received $9 for it - was a great success, turning him overnight into something of a household name.
Poe died in 1849, aged just 40. The circumstances were somewhat odd; he was found wandering the streets of Baltimore at five in the morning, delirious and wearing someone else s clothes, and he repeatedly cried out Reynolds! during the hours before his death. The cause of death remains a mystery, with everything from epilepsy to rabies cited. However, whatever the reason behind his unusual passing, Poe s legacy is a formidable one: He is seen today as one of the greatest practitioners of Gothic and detective fiction that ever lived, and popular culture is replete with references to him.
TALES OF MYSTERY AND IMAGINATION
INTRODUCTION
LAST year a selection of Emerson s writings was issued in this series, and it seems desirable to follow it with a collection of the best work of that American writer who, morally and intellectually, was Emerson s extreme antitype. There could be no harsher contrast than between the careers of the two men. One came early to recognition, and lived his simple, blameless, prosperous life amid the plaudits of the world. The other died young after a career of bitter drudgery, and left little behind him but a legacy of hate. In Edgar Allan Poe genius burned with no hard, gem-like flame, but with a murky intensity that scandalised his contemporaries. In the orderly bourgeois world of young America he moved like a panther among polar-bears. No nation-least of all a young, self-satisfied nation-likes to be told that it is one vast perambulating humbug, and he spoke his opinions equally plainly of his colleagues in literature.
The natural result followed. Every species of literary vulture battened on his reputation, the scandals of his life were magnified, and his genius was hidden by a cloud of vulgar abuse. No man was less fortunate in his epoch and his country. He found an America, middle-class, prosaic, still half Puritan and indomitably respectable, and he ran his head against the stone walls which hemmed him in. He wrote his great stories for starvation wages, since the taste which could value them had largely to be created. Had he lived to-day, we can well imagine that a more cosmopolitan America would have made him a hero almost beyond his deserts. Had he fared less hardly at the world s hands, there might have been no gall in his pen and fewer dark places in his life.
His posthumous reward has been great, for to no other American writer has it been given to exercise so profound an influence at once on English and French literature. For myself, I should rank him, in the hierarchy of American prose, below Hawthorne, who seems to me to have combined a profounder moral insight with an equal sense of form and an equal imaginative force; but certainly, save for Hawthorne, he has no rival.
The tragic story of his life has been often written: one of the best short biographies is that by Professor Harrison of Virginia, which is prefixed to the recent Virginia Edition of his works. He was born in 1809, the same year which gave to the world Tennyson, Gladstone, Lincoln, Darwin, Mendelssohn, and Chopin. It is part of the irony of his fate that Boston, the city which he hated like the plague, should have had the honour of giving him birth. He came of good stock, originally from Ulster; his parents were on the stage, and lived a roving, unhappy, impecunious life, both dying shortly after he was born. He was adopted by an elderly Scotsman called Allan, a merchant in Richmond, Virginia; and till his adopted father s second marriage regarded himself, and was regarded by others, as his heir. He spent some years at school in England, where he imbibed the romance of an older country, and then went at an early age to the University of Virginia. He did not greatly distinguish himself there in scholarship, but became noted as a bon vivant and an athlete.
He next went to the famous West Point Academy, and afterwards, Allan having died without leaving him anything, turned to journalism as a profession. For the rest of his days he was tied to the drudgery of the pen, and wrote for his bread tales, poems, reviews, essays, any kind of work, much of it strangely bad, but some of an excellence which no contemporary could claim. He made many enemies, and his wild neurotic nature kept him always in a state of white-heat, a fury either of affection or dislike. He took to drink and drugs, though he was never an ordinary drunkard, seeking a stimulant or a narcotic to relieve the misery of his daily life.
His end was as tragic and strange as his life. Passing through Baltimore, he seems to have been drinking in a tavern, where he was drugged by some electioneering roughs and carried round in their custody to the different voting-booths. He never recovered from the treatment, and a few days later died in hospital.
To most people Poe is best known as a poet, and the poems which have the widest vogue are unfortunately his worst productions. The Raven was, in his own words, to be composed of equal proportions of Beauty and Quaintness intermingled with Melancholy. The result was a parody of his peculiar qualities, and the parody, as in the similar case of The Bells, has been accepted for the original. That sinister fowl has stood between him and the highest kind of poetic fame. The vagueness of exaltation, he wrote, aroused by a sweet air (which should be strictly indefinite and never too strongly suggestive) is precisely what we should aim at in poetry. It is a narrow definition, but in his small body of verse he repeatedly reaches the ideal. To Helen, The City in the Sea, The Haunted Palace, To One in Paradise, The Sleeper, For Annie, Annabel Lee, and even beautiful nonsense like Ulalume, have all the strange haunting sweetness of music.
On his own definition Poe is a master-singer, and on any definition he is a true lyric poet. But his real medium was prose, for, apart from gifts of style and melody, he had in the highest degree the constructive imagination which can reproduce a realm of fancy with the minute realism of everyday life. He reveals all around us the shadowy domain of the back-world, and behind our smug complacency the shrieking horror of the unknown. There is no humour in him, none of that wise detachment, which makes Wandering Willie s Tale immortal, for every nerve, as he writes, quivers at the terrors he is conjuring. To this imaginative intensity he added a style of singular flexibility and grace. He has, to be sure, appalling lapses into the banal, but at his best he has a store of apt and jewelled words in which to clothe his recondite thoughts. It is this combination which endeared him to Th ophile Gautier and his school, and gave him Baudelaire and Mallarm as his translators.
But style and imagination, if left alone, might have landed him in an unprofitable mysticism. What gives him his unique power is the mathematical accuracy of his mind. All his life he had a passion for cryptographs, and maintained that human ingenuity could create no cypher which human ingenuity could not unravel. His mind worked on data with the most logical precision and he once startled Dickens by predicting the whole plot of Barnaby Rudge from the material furnished in the earlier chapters. Hence in all his tales there is a clear sequence of cause and e