The Works of Edgar Allan Poe Volume 4

by Edgar Allan Poe

Overview

The Works of Edgar Allan Poe Volume 4 Edgar Allan Poe - This vintage book contains the fourth volume of "The Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe". 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. The tales contained within this volume include: "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion", "Mystification", "Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling", "The Journal of Julius Rodman", "The Business Man", "The Man of the Crowd", "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", "A Descent into the Mealstr m", "The island of the Fay", and others.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783986470968
Publisher:	Phoemixx Classics Ebooks
Publication date:	08/30/2021
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	277
File size:	873 KB
Age Range:	12 Years

About the Author

The name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, and The Fall of the House of Usher. This versatile writer's oeuvre includes short stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a book of scientific theory, and hundreds of essays and book reviews. He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the science fiction genre, but he made his living as America's first great literary critic and theoretician. Poe's reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry. Just as the bizarre characters in Poe's stories have captured the public imagination so too has Poe himself. He is seen as a morbid, mysterious figure lurking in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or crumbling castles. This is the Poe of legend. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame the author's name. The real Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston on January 19, 1809. Edgar was the second of three children. His other brother William Henry Leonard Poe would also become a poet before his early death, and Poe's sister Rosalie Poe would grow up to teach penmanship at a Richmond girls' school. Within three years of Poe's birth both of his parents had died, and he was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia while Poe's siblings went to live with other families. Mr. Allan would rear Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe had dreams of being a writer in emulation of his childhood hero the British poet Lord Byron. Early poetic verses found written in a young Poe's handwriting on the backs of Allan's ledger sheets reveal how little interest Poe had in the tobacco business.

Read an Excerpt

PHILOSOPHY OF FURNITURE IN the internal decoration, if not in the external architecture of their residences, the English are supreme. The Italians have but little sentiment beyond marbles and colors. In France, meliora probant, deteriora sequuntur — the people are too much a race of gad-abouts to maintain those household proprieties of which, indeed, they have a delicate appreciation, or at least the elements of a proper sense. The Chinese and most of the Eastern races have a warm but inappropriate fancy. The Scotch are poor decorists. The Dutch have, perhaps, an indeterminate idea that a curtain is not a cabbage. In Spain they are all curtains — a nation of hangmen. The Russians do not furnish. The Hottentots and Kickapoos are very well in their way. The Yankees alone are preposterous. How this happens, it is not difficult to see. We have no aristocracy of blood, and having therefore, as a natural, and indeed as an inevitable thing, fashioned for ourselves an aristocracy of dollars, the display of wealth has here to take the place and perform the office of the heraldic display in monarchical countries. By a transition readily understood, and which might have been as readily foreseen, we have been brought to merge in simple show our notions of taste itself. To speak less abstractly. In England, for example, no mere parade of costly appurtenances would be so likely as with us to create an impression of the beautiful in respect to the appurtenances themselves, or of taste as regards the proprietor; this for the reason, first, that wealth is not, in England, the loftiest object of ambition as constituting a nobility; and secondly, that there the true nobility of blood,confining itself within the strict limits of legitimate taste, rather avoids than affects that mere costlin...

Table of Contents

THE DEVIL IN THE BELFRY

LIONIZING

X-ING A PARAGRAPH

METZENGERSTEIN

THE SYSTEM OF DOCTOR TARR AND PROFESSOR FETHER

THE LITERARY LIFE OF THINGUM BOB, ESQ.

HOW TO WRITE A BLACKWOOD ARTICLE.

A PREDICAMENT

MYSTIFICATION

DIDDLING

THE ANGEL OF THE ODD

MELLONTA TAUTA

THE DUC DE L’OMELETTE.

THE OBLONG BOX.

LOSS OF BREATH

THE MAN THAT WAS USED UP.

THE BUSINESS MAN

THE LANDSCAPE GARDEN

MAELZEL’S CHESS-PLAYER

THE POWER OF WORDS

THE COLLOQUY OF MONOS AND UNA

THE CONVERSATION OF EIROS AND CHARMION

SHADOW—A PARABLE