Filled with broken hearts and black ravens, Edgar Allan Poe’s ghastly tales have delighted readers for centuries. Born in Boston in 1809, Poe was orphaned at age two. He was soon adopted by a Virginia family who worked as tombstone merchants. In 1827 he enlisted in the Army and subsequently failed out of West Point. His first published story, The Raven, was a huge success, but his joy was overshadowed by the death of his wife. Poe devoted his life to writing and his tragic life often inspired his work.
"The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allan Poe USA, 1846 How it starts: "·Fortunato and I both were members of very old and important Italian families. We used to play together when we were children" How it ends: "In pace requiescat!" PDF + AUDIO
With an unconventional new perspective, Anderson identifies Edgar Allan Poe's texts as a journey and explores the ways Poe both encounters and transcends the realm of the material.
Looming large in the popular imagination as a serious poet and lively drunk who died in penury, Edgar Allan Poe was also the most celebrated and notorious writer of his day. He died broke and alone at the age of forty, but not before he had written some of the greatest works in the English language, from the chilling “The Tell-Tale Heart” to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”—the first modern detective story—to the iconic poem “The Raven.”
Critics have often charged Edgar Allan Poe with sloppy writing. Using stylistics and classical rhetorical theory, Brett Zimmerman demonstrates that Poe was in fact a brilliant and deliberate lexical technician who varied his prose style according to genre and the world views and the mental health or illness of his narrators. Zimmerman breaks new ground in Poe studies by providing a catalogue of three hundred figures of speech and thought in the author's oeuvre, including his tales, personal correspondence, literary criticism, book reviews, and Marginalia.