Tales by Edgar Allan Poe

First published: 1845

Subjects: Crime, death, and the supernatural

Type of work: Short fiction

Recommended Ages: 13-18

Form and Content

Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales is his most representative collection, containing a wider variety of stories than the earlier Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1839). The dozen stories in the book include his metaphysical fables “The Colloquy of Monos and Una,” “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion,” and “Mesmeric Revelation”; two of his dark tales of obsession and isolation, “The Black Cat” and “The Man of the Crowd”; one of his best-known literary parodies, “Lionizing”; his chilling gothic adventure “A Descent into the Maelstrom”; his four innovative tales of ratiocination and detection, “The Gold Bug,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” and “The Purloined Letter”; and his most famous masterpiece of romantic alienation, “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

In “Mesmeric Revelation,” Poe uses hypnotism to explore his own metaphysical views about the nature of reality as being design and form rather than simple matter. Under a hypnotic trance, the character Vankirk responds to questions about the nature of God and material reality with theories that Poe later develops in his philosophic poem Eureka (1848). “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” is a dialogue between Charmion, an aged spirit from the netherworld, and Eiros, a new spirit whom he inducts into the realm of Edenic reality. The same theme is continued in the dialogue “The Colloquy of Monos and Una,” in which the Fall of Man is described as a fall from the life of concrete reality into the life of science and abstraction.

“The Black Cat” is one of Poe’s best-known stories of the perverse, a psychological motivation he calls a “prime mover” of the human soul that makes characters feel compelled to act in a way that they know they should not. The obsession in this story centers on a man who kills his wife because of his unreasonable fascination with a black cat. In “The Man of the Crowd,” the narrator of the story becomes so fascinated with an old man whom he sees in a crowd one evening that he follows him all night and the next day until he discovers that the old man is an emblem of human loneliness.

“Lionizing” and “A Descent into the Maelstrom” are examples of two types of fiction popular in Poe’s time; the first is a satiric parody of the habit of making some writers into idolized stars (something that always eluded Poe in his lifetime), and the second is a version of the typical Blackwood magazine adventure, in which Poe presents the stereotyped gothic tale of a man who undergoes a quasi-supernatural science-fiction adventure—this time in a giant whirlpool in the North Atlantic—and survives it.

Poe invented the modern detective story, creating in his sleuth Dupin the model for the amateur detective that millions of readers have loved in such characters as Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. Although “The Gold-Bug”—Poe’s most-famous story during his lifetime—does not feature a detective or a crime, it does depend on the kind of careful observation and deduction that characterizes his detective Dupin. Most of Poe’s contributions to the detective story genre are introduced in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in which the “criminal” is an escaped orangutan; Dupin’s methods were so popular that Poe applied them to a real-life murder of a woman named Mary Rogers in “The Mystery of Marie Roget.” Yet, Poe’s story of an incriminating letter hidden paradoxically in plain view is the detective story that most appeals to connoisseurs of the form, for it sums up its intellectual and aesthetic complexities.

“The Fall of the House of Usher” has become Poe’s most well known story, for in it he transforms the plot of the pot-boiler gothic romance into a probing study of isolation and the dangers of an obsessive fascination with art. Isolated within himself and his house, Roderick Usher has come to stand for the ultimate disintegration of the nineteenth century Romantic artist-hero who dares to cut himself off from the world around him.

Critical Context

Although Edgar Allan Poe is among the most widely read of all American writers, he has not always been taken seriously by critics. T. S. Eliot once said that Poe had the intellect of a “gifted young person before puberty,” and the great novelist Henry James remarked that an “enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.” Whereas it is true that Poe has often been more admired by adolescents than by adults, Poe may have influenced more young people to become writers and teachers of writing than any other American author. Jorge Luis Borges, the South American master of Magical Realism, and John Barth, America’s best-known practitioner of fabulism, are only two of the many writers who have admitted as much.

Recent literary studies have finally begun to justify what loyal readers of Poe have always believed—that Poe understood the nature of narrative better than any other nineteenth century writer. His stories, once dismissed as simple gothic thrillers, are now being analyzed for their self-conscious manipulation of narrative devices and their darkly existential view of reality. Poe, plagued during his life by debts, tragedy, and depression, is finally being recognized as a master of fictional technique and his works as the precursors of modern existential vision.

Bibliography

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Hoffman, Daniel. Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998.

Hutchisson, James M. Poe. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005.

Irwin, John T. The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytical Detective Story. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

Kennedy, J. Gerald. A Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

May, Charles E. Edgar Allan Poe: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1991.

Peeples, Scott. Edgar Allan Poe Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1998.

Quinn, Arthur Hobson. Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

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Whalen, Terence. Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999.