The Works of Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe, 1850
Poe's detective Dupin, a whirlpool, a black cat, a revenge vow: tales that made detection and dread into modern literary pleasures.
Edgar Allan Poe
1809–1849
Poe's pages run on dread and close attention: a detective who reads a room like a text, a man caught in a whirlpool, a black cat that will not stay buried. Start with «The Raven», short enough to read in one sitting, where a grieving scholar and a midnight bird turn one word into a kind of torture; then try the tales in «The Works of Edgar Allan Poe» (1850), which share that same grip of obsession and dread and helped make detection a modern pleasure.
Feels like dread, madness and death.
Start with The Works of Edgar Allan Poe.
Poe's 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' (1841) introduced C. Auguste Dupin, often called the first fictional detective; Doyle's Holmes later acknowledged the model.
The logic of revenge, laid out with terrifying patience.
The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge. You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that I gave utterance to a threat. At length I would be avenged; this was a point definitively settled—but the very definitiveness with which it was resolved, precluded the idea of risk. I must not only punish, but punish with impunity. A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong. Books by Edgar Allan Poe
The Works of Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe, 1838
Shipwreck, starvation, obsessive grief, and a plague masquerade in an undertaker's shop: Poe's strangest long tales and sketches gathered in one volume.
The Raven
Edgar Allan Poe, 1845
A grieving scholar, a midnight raven, and one word that refuses to become comfort. The poem that made grief sound like a knock at the door.
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