Selected Tales »

David Van Leer is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of California, Davis.

“In his stories of mystery and imagination Poe created a world-record for the English language: perhaps for all languages.”
—George Bernard Shaw

Read throughout the world, admired by writers as different as Dostoevsky and H.G. Wells, translated by Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe has become a legendary figure, representing the artist as obsessed outcast and romantic failure. His nightmarish visions, shaped by cool artistic calculation, reveal some of the dark possibilities of human experience. But his enormous popularity and his continuing influence on literature depend less on legend or vision than on his stylistic accomplishments as a writer. All of Poe's best-known and most representative works are gathered here, as well as his masterly “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.”

Library of America Paperback Classics feature authoritative texts drawn from the acclaimed Library of America series and introduced by today's most distinguished scholars and writers. Each book features a detailed chronology of the author's life and career, and essay on the choice of the text, and notes.

The contents of this Paperback Classic are drawn from Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales, volume number 19 in The Library of America series. It is joined in the series by a companion volume, number 20, Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews.

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Morella Ligeia The Man That Was Used Up The Fall of the House of Usher William Wilson The Man of the Crowd The Murders in the Rue Morgue Eleonora The Masque of the Red Death The Pit and the Pendulum The Mystery of Marie Rogêt The Tell-Tale Heart The Gold-Bug The Black Cat A Tale of the Ragged Mountains The Purloined Letter The Systems of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether The Imp of the Perverse The Cask of Amontillado The Domain of Arnheim Hop-Frog Von Kempelen and his Discovery