Enormously popular and widely admired, Edgar Allan Poe occupies an extraordinary place in American literature.Technically skillful and spiritually haunting, Poe's body of work--poems, tales, a novel, and essays--awakens readers to the darkerside of humanity. This Norton Critical Edition includes Poe's mostimportant writing, introduced, annotated, and edited by leading Poescholar G. R. Thompson.

Edgar A. Poe： An American Life (1809-1849)

 A Note on the Texts and Annotations

 Acknowledgments

The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe

 POEMS

Tamerlane

Dreams

Spirits of the Dead

Evening Star

Imitation

[Stanzas]

A Dream

[The Happiest Day]

The Lake--To--

Sonnet--To Science

M Aaraaf

Introduction

Fairy-Land [ 1]

Fairy Land [2]

[Alone]

To Helen

Israfel

The Sleeper

The Valley of Unrest

The City in the Sea

The Coliseum

Sonnet--Silence

Dream-Land

The Raven

Ulalume--A Ballad

The Bells

To Helen

A Dream within a Dream

For Annie

Eldorado

Annabel Lee

TALES AND SKETCHES

Metzengerstein

Loss of Breath

Ms. Found in a Bottle

The Assignation

Some Passages in the Life of a Lion [Lionizing]

Shadow--A Parable

Silence.--A Fable

Berenice

King Pest

Ligeia

How to Write a Blackwood Article

A Predicament

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

A Descent into the Maelstrom

The Colloquy of Monos and Una

Never Bet the Devil Your Head

The Oval Portrait

The Masque of the Red Death

The Pit and the Pendulum

The Tell-Tale Heart

The Gold-Bug

The Black Cat

The Premature Burial

The Purloined Letter

Some Words with a Mummy

The Power of Words

The Imp of the Perverse

The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar

The Cask of Amontillado

Hop-Frog; or, The Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs

 THE NARRATIVE OF ARTHUR GORDON PYM

 FROM EUREKA： AN ESSAY ON THE MATERIAL AND SPIRITUAL UNIVERSE

Backgrounds and Contexts

 LETTERS, PREFACES, ESSAYS, AND REVIEWS

To John Allan (Letter 13, May 29, 1829)

Letter to B.--

To Joseph T. and Edwin Buckingham (Letter 37,May 4, 1833)

The Folio Club

To Thomas W. White (Letter 42, April 30, 1835)

From Theodore S. Fay [Review of Norman Leslie]

From Morris Mattson [Review of Paul Ulric]

John P. Kennedy to Poe (February 9, t 836)

To John P. Kennedy (Letter 57, February 11, 1836)

J. K. Paulding to T. W. White (March 3, 1836)

From Joseph Rodman Drake--Fitz-Greene Halleck [Review of The Culprit Fay and Alnwick Castle]

To Harrison Hall (Letter 74, September 2, 1836)

From Robert M. Bird [Review of Sheppard Lee]

From Baron de la Motte Fouque [Review of Undine]

To Philip P. Cooke (Letter 82, September 21, 1839)

From Thomas Moore [Review of Alciphron]

Preface (Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque--1840)

Prospectus of The Penn Magazine

To William E. Burton (Letter 93, June 1, 1840)

From Edward Lytton Bulwer [Review of Night and Morning]

From Lambert A. Wilmer [Review of The Quacks of Helicon]

Exordium to Critical Notices

From Henry Wadsworth Longfellow [Review of Ballads and Other Poems]

Nathaniel Hawthorne [Review of Twice-Told Tales]

April 1842

May 1842

To Joseph Evans Snodgrass (Letter 137, June 4, 1842)

To James R. Lowell (Letter 179, July 2, 1844)

From Marginalia

James Russell Lowell · From Our Contributors.-No. ⅩⅦ. Edgar Allan Poe

From Henry Wadsworth Longfellow [Review of Poems on Slavery]

From Thomas Hood [Review of Prose and Verse]

[Review of Poe's Tales]

Preface (The Raven and Other Poems)

The Philosophy of Composition

To Philip P. Cooke (Letter 240, August 9, 1846)

Nathaniel Hawthorne [Review of Twice-Told Tales and Mosses from an Old Manse]

From James Russell Lowell [Review of A Fable for the Critics]

From The Poetic Principle

[Walter G. Bowen] · A Reviewer Reviewed

George R. Graham · From The Late Edgar Mlan Poe

Charles Baudelaire · From Edgar Mlan Poe： His Life and His Works

Walt Whitman · From Edgar Poe's Significance

 TRANSCENDENTALISM AND ALTERNATIVE ROMANTICISM

Frederic Henry Hedge · [On Immanuel Kant and German Transcendentalism]

Friedrich Schlegel · Fragments

  From Lyceum

  From Athenaeum

  · From Dialogue on Poetry

August Wilhelm Schlegel · Dramatic Lectures

  From Lecture Ⅲ

  From Lecture Ⅺ

  From Lecture ⅩⅥ

  From Lecture ⅩⅩⅢ

Jean Paul Friedrich Richter · Preschool for Aesthetics

  From The Seventh Program. On Humoristic Poetry

 SCIENCES OF THE MIND

Johann G. Spurzheim · The Physiognomical System

  of Drs. Gall and Spurzheim

  From VI. Organ of the Propensity to Destroy, or of Destructiveness

Orson S. Fowler · Fowler's Practical Phrenology

  From 21. Ideality

  Phrenological Chart

Thomas C. Upham · From Outlines of Imperfection andDisordered Action

 POPULAR FICTION： BLACKWOOD'S AND THE SENSATION TALE

Anonymous · Extracts from Gosschen's Diary

Anonymous · The Buried Alive

William Maginn · The Man in the Bell

 THE SOUTH AND SLAVERY

James E. Heath · Southern Literature

[Nathaniel Beverley Tucker] · Slavery

Poe · To Beverley Tucker (Letter 62, May 2, 1836)

J. V. Ridgely · The Authorship of the "Paulding-Drayton Review"

Poe · To Joseph Evans Snodgrass (Letter 95,June 17, 1840)

Criticism

 Floyd Stovall · From Poe's Debt to Coleridge

 Robert Colin McLean · From Poetic Theory

 Richard Wilbur · From The House of Poe

 James W. Gargano · The Question of Poe's Narrators

 Joseph J. Moldenhauer · From Murder as a Fine Art：

 Basic Connections between Poe's Aesthetics,

 Psychology, and Moral Vision

 Paul John Eakin · From Poe's Sense of an Ending

 Grace Farrell · The Quest of Arthur Gordon Pym

 Liahna Armstrong · The Shadow's Shadow： The Motif of the

 Double in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter"

 Barton Levi St. Armand · From The "Mysteries" of Edgar

  Poe： The Quest for a Monomyth in Gothic Literature

 Joseph N. Riddel · From The "Crypt" of Edgar Poe

 J. Gerald Kennedy · From Phantasms of Death in Poe's

  Fiction

 John Carlos Rowe · From Antebellum Slavery and

  Modern Criticism： Edgar Allan Poe's Pyre and

  "The Purloined Letter"

 Terence Whalen · From Average Racism： Poe, Slavery, and

  the Wages of Literary Nationalism

 John T. Irwin · Detective Fiction as High Art：

  Lacan, Derrida, and Johnson on "The Purloined

  Letter"

Selected Bibliography

Index