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Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe Hardcover – November 18, 1966
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This single volume brings together all of Poe's stories and poems, and illuminates the diverse and multifaceted genius of one of the greatest and most influential figures in American literary history.
- Print length832 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherDoubleday
- Publication dateNovember 18, 1966
- Dimensions5.65 x 1.94 x 8.51 inches
- ISBN-100385074077
- ISBN-13978-0385074070
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- Publisher : Doubleday (November 18, 1966)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 832 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0385074077
- ISBN-13 : 978-0385074070
- Item Weight : 2.07 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.65 x 1.94 x 8.51 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #80,234 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #196 in Classic American Literature
- #1,699 in Classic Literature & Fiction
- #3,906 in Literary Fiction (Books)
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About the author

Author, poet, and literary critic, Edgar Allan Poe is credited with pioneering the short story genre, inventing detective fiction, and contributing to the development of science fiction. However, Poe is best known for his works of the macabre, including such infamous titles as The Raven, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Lenore, and The Fall of the House of Usher. Part of the American Romantic Movement, Poe was one of the first writers to make his living exclusively through his writing, working for literary journals and becoming known as a literary critic. His works have been widely adapted in film. Edgar Allan Poe died of a mysterious illness in 1849 at the age of 40.
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There is so much entertainment & enjoyment in this little dandy that you simply can't go wrong with the small price tag! And with the near completeness of this addition, you can even pass it on to your children so that they can enjoy it for many years to come!
There is perhaps a reason why Poe is today best known for a few works making up only a small part of his output. Reading his dramatic fragment "Politian", a fusty cod-Shakespearean blank-verse tragedy set in Renaissance Italy, I quickly understood why, after a few scenes, Poe abandoned not only the play itself but any idea of making a career as a dramatist. (He never wrote for the stage again). About his leaden tales of humour and satire the kindest thing to say would be that most of them clearly reveal just why Poe is not principally remembered today as a humorist or satirist, although there are occasionally some flashes of interest. One that caught my attention was "The 1,002nd Tale of Scheherazade", which uses the language of the Arabian Nights fairy-tale to inform the reader of some of the wonders of nineteenth-century science and technology, the twist being that fact is indeed stranger than fiction and that when Scheherazade recounts scientific fact rather than fantasy nobody believes her.
This volume also includes Poe's only novel "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket". This starts out as a gripping seafaring yarn about a young man who stows away on a Nantucket whaling ship, and whose experiences include mutiny, shipwreck and cannibalism. The second half of the story, however, turns into something closer to science fiction, as Pym is rescued by a ship on a voyage to explore the Antarctic, a region of the globe still largely unknown when the book was published in 1838. According to Poe Antarctica is not an ice-covered continent but an open sea with a relatively mild climate, which gets steadily milder the closer one approaches to the South Pole, and containing a number of islands populated by dark-skinned savages.
Poe can be seen as a pioneer of science fiction, although the advance of scientific knowledge since his day means that what was once speculative fiction is now either banal fact or else completely implausible. Readers in the 1840s might have been persuaded that it was possible to travel from the Earth to the Moon by balloon, as happens to the protagonist of "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaal", but modern readers are unlikely to be so gullible, and the ending, in which Poe pulls the rug out from under his readers' feet by revealing the whole thing to be a hoax, will not come as a surprise.
Another genre in which Poe acted as a pioneer was that of the detective story. Although he only wrote three stories in this genre, his hero C. Auguste Dupin anticipates Sherlock Holmes in his ability to solve crimes by deductive reasoning. Like Holmes, and a number of other fictional sleuths such as Hercule Poirot, Dupin is not a police officer but a gentlemanly amateur. Of the three Dupin stories, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter" both end with an elegant solution to the mystery, although I found the third, "The Murder of Marie Roget", dull and pedestrian. "The Gold-Bug" is a mystery story of another type, concentrating not on a crime but on a search for buried treasure and reflecting Poe's interest in the science of cryptography.
During his lifetime, Poe was better known as a literary critic than as an author of fiction, and in the years after his death had the curious distinction, for an American writer, of becoming better known in Continental Europe than in the English-speaking world. He was particularly well-known in France, where his work was translated and popularised by Charles Baudelaire. This is perhaps not surprising, as I have often found there is something rather un- American about those works by which he is best remembered today. One might have expected the early literary works of the young Republic to be vigorous, optimistic and democratic in tone, but Poe's Gothic tales and poems are sombre and pessimistic, often aristocratic in their subject-matter and frequently set in Europe. "Metzengerstein", for example, is set in Hungary, "The Masque of the Red Death" in mediaeval Italy, "The Pit and the Pendulum" in Spain under the Inquisition and the Dupin stories in France. Several of his stories deal with a mad or cruel aristocrat or ruler who is overcome by some terrible fate ("Metzengerstein", "The Masque of the Red Death" or "Hop-Frog"), and a recurring theme in others is a ruined or ruinous palace or castle. In "The Fall of the House of Usher" the title has a double meaning; it can be interpreted as referring to the decline or a once-great family or to the collapse of an actual building.
Unlike some earlier Gothic writers, Poe does not always make use of the supernatural in his stories. He can also create a sense of horror by evoking the terrible power of nature ("A Descent into the Maelstrom") or the cruelty of which humans are capable ("The Pit and the Pendulum"). Both those stories end happily, with the narrator saved almost miraculously from his terrifying predicament, although an escape from death is the exception rather than the rule in Poe's horror stories, where death is more often something inexorable. The death of a beloved young woman is a particularly recurrent theme, possibly reflecting the early deaths of his mother and his wife, and occurs in poems such as "Annabel Lee", "The Raven" and "Ulalume"), and stories such as "Ligeia" and "The Fall of the House of Usher". (Both these stories also deal with another of Poe's obsessions, premature burial).
Both as a poet and as an author of short stories, Poe is a very uneven writer. At his best, however, he must rank as one of America's finest with a unique ability to conjure up an atmosphere is psychological horror in his stories and to convey emotion through the musical use of language in his poetry. (Perhaps his greatest achievement in this regard is "The Bells", in which he reproduces in words the sounds of four different types of bell- silver, golden, brazen and iron, corresponding to the emotions of merriment, joy, terror and grief).
On a final note, I was very impressed by the handsome elegance of the hardback volume itself, confirming my view that American books, both hardback and paperback, are often superior in quality to British ones.
Even though Poe was something of a "mixed bag" (a critic once said of him that he was "three-fifths genius and two-fifths sheer fudge") his best tales are still intimidating narrative achievements. Some of the best are: "The Pit and the Pendulum", "The Masque of The Red Death", "The Black Cat", "The Tell-Tale Heart", "The Imp of the Perverse", or "Descent into the Maelström" (to name just a few, of course). To pass away without having read some (if not all) of these masterpieces should be considered as something akin to a deadly sin or a capital offense. Poe was not A short story writer, he was THE short story writer, and many of his tales are still coveted triumphs that many aspirants to penpushers revere and envy. No matter if Poe is not sufficiently appreciated in America (is that really so?), here in Europe we'll be extremely pleased to give him a home. As a matter of fact I'd even contribute tax money to build him a public statue if I was asked to. The good moments that his best works have given me make him deserving of that. No other American writer has been so influential or has achieved so great a renown worldwide (especially in Europe and South America). Compared to his, the work of other writers like Mark Twain or William Faulkner strike me as "period pieces" and "local colour narratives".
Among all the various editions readily available compiling the entire Works of Edgar Allan Poe, this omnibus by "Doubleday Publishing" is perhaps the best option for your money. It includes both his entire poetry and short fiction, as well as his only novel (`The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym'); it is also reasonably priced and the book is quite compact, without being excessively large or bulky (you are not required to be a weight lifter to read it in bed). The only edition that probably surpasses this one in quality and contents is that published by "The Library of America" (but which is also more expensive). If, like me, you don't care much about Poe's poetry, then "The Complete Stories" by Everyman's Library (ISBN: 978-0679417408) should be a good choice as well. It doesn't really matter as long as people keep reading Poe from time to time and thus maintaining his brilliant legacy alive.
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Book is well made, pages are thick enough, size of the text is acceptable.
Reviewed in Canada on February 7, 2021








