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 darker side of humanity. This Norton Critical Edition includes Poe's most important writing, introduced, annotated, and edited by leading Poe scholar G. R. Thompson. "Backgrounds and Contexts" includes fifty-seven judiciously chosen documents that illuminate Poe's short but prolific career, among them Poe's reviews, prefaces, and related correspondence as well as thematic pieces dealing with Transcendentalism and alternative Romanticism, psychological science, sensation fiction, and slavery and the South. Fourteen critical essays address the major themes and genres of Poe's work. Among the contributors are Richard Wilbur, Grace Farrell, Barton Levi St. Armand, J. Gerald Kennedy, and John T. Irwin. A Selected Bibliography and an Index to Works and First Lines of Poems are also included. —back cover Table of Contents Acknowledgments Edgar A. Poe—An American Life (1809-1849) A Note on Texts and Annotations The Texts of The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe POEMS Introduction Tamerlane Dreams Spirits of the Dead Evening Star Imitation Stanzas: In Youth A Dream The Happiest Day The Lake Sonnet—To Science Al Aaraaf Introduction Fairyland [1] Fairyland [2] Alone To Helen [Stanard] 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 [Whitman] A Dream Within a Dream For Annie Eldorado Annabel Lee TALES AND SKETCHES Introduction Metzengerstein Loss of Breath [A Decided Loss] MS. Found in a Bottle The Assignation [The Visionary] Lionizing [Some Passages in the Life of a Lion] Shadow Silence Berenice King Pest Ligeia How to Write a Blackwood Article A Predicament [The Scythe of Time] The Man That Was Used Up The Fall of the House of Usher William Wilson The Man in the Crowd The Murders in the Rue Morgue A Descent into the Maelström The Colloquy of Monos and Una Never Bet the Devil Your Head The Oval Portrait [Life in Death] 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 of the Case of M. Valdemar The Cask of Amontillado Hop-Frog The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym Selections from Eureka Backgrounds and Contexts Edgar Allan Poe—Preface to Tamerlane and Other Poems Edgar Allan Poe—To B__________ (July 1836) Edgar Allan Poe—To Joseph T. and Edwin Buckingham (May 4, 1833) Edgar Allan Poe—Preface to Tales of the Folio Club Edgar Allan Poe—To T. W. Hite (April 30, 1835) Edgar Allan Poe—Review of Theodore Fay, Norman Leslie Edgar Allan Poe—Review of Morris Mattson, Paul Ulric J. P. Kennedy—To Edgar Allan Poe (February 9. 1836) Edgar Allan Poe—To J. P. Kennedy (February 11, 1836) J. K. Paulding—To T. W. White (March 3, 1836) Edgar Allan Poe—Review of Drake & Halleck (April 1836) Edgar Allan Poe—To Harrison Hall (September 2, 1836) Edgar Allan Poe—Review of Robert M. Bird, Sheppard Lee (September 1836) Edgar Allan Poe—Review of Baron de la Motte Fouqué, Undine (September 1839) Edgar Allan Poe—To Philip P. Cooke (September 21, 1839) Edgar Allan Poe—Review of Thomas Moore, Alciphron Edgar Allan Poe—Preface to Tales of the Groesque and Arabesque Edgar Allan Poe—Prospectus for Penn Magazine Edgar Allan Poe—To William E. Burton (June 1, 1840) Edgar Allan Poe—Review of Edward Lytton Bulwer, Night and Morning Edgar Allan Poe—Review of Lambert A. Wilmer, Quacks of Helicon Edgar Allan Poe—Excordium to Critical Notices Edgar Allan Poe—Review of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ballads and Other Poems Edgar Allan Poe—Two Reviews of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales Edgar Allan Poe—To J. E. Snodgrass (June 4, 1842) Edgar Allan Poe—To James Russell Lowell (July 2, 1844) Edgar Allan Poe—Preface to the Marginalia series James Russell Lowell—Our Contributors . . . Edgar Allan Poe Anonymous [Edgar Allan Poe]—Review of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Edgar Allan Poe—Review of Thomas Hood, Prose and Verse Unsigned Review—Tales of Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe—Preface to The Raven and Other Poems Edgar Allan Poe—The Philosophy of Composition Edgar Allan Poe—To P. P. Cooke (August 9, 1846) Edgar Allan Poe—Review of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales and Mosses from an Old Manse Edgar Allan Poe—The Poetic Principle Edgar Allan Poe—A Reviewer Reviewed George Graham—The Later Edgar Poe Charles Baudelaire—Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Works Walt Whitman—[Edgar Poe's Significance] TRANSCENDENTALISM AND ALTERNATIVE ROMANTICISM Introduction Frederic Henry Hedge—On Immanuel Kant and German Transcendentalism Friedrich Schlegel—Fragments from Lyceum, Athenaeum, and Dialogue of Poesie August Wilhelm Schlegel—The Tragic; The Comic Jean Paul Friedrich Richter—Humoristic Subjectivity SCIENCES OF THE MIND Introduction Lavater, Gall, and Spurzheim—From Physiognomical System of Dr. Gall and Spurzheim Orson S. Fowler—From Fowler's Practical Phrenology Thomas C. Upham—From Outlines of Imperfection and Disordered Action POPULAR FICTION: BLACKWOOD'S AND THE SENSATION TALE Introduction Anonymous—Extracts from Gosschen's Diary Anonymous—The Buried Alive William Maginn—The Man in the Bell THE SOUTH AND SLAVERY Introduction James E. Heath—Southern Literature Anonymous—Slavery Edgar Allan Poe—To Beverley Tucker (May 2, 1836) J. V. Ridgely—The Authorship of the Paulding-Drayton Review Edgar Allan Poe—To J. E. Snodgrass (June 17, 1840) Criticism Introduction Floyd Stovall—[Poetry, Imagination, and Cosmos: Poe's Debt to Coleridge] Robert C. McLean—[Poetic Theory and Affective Poetry: Poe and George Tucker] Richard Wilbur—The House of Poe James W. Gargano—The Question of Poe's Narrators Joseph J. Moldenhauer—Murder as a Fine Art: Basic Connections between Poe's Aesthetics, Psychology, and Moral Vision Paul John Eakin—Poe's Sense of an Ending Grace Farrell—The Quest of Arthur Gordon Pym Liahna Klenman Babener—The Shadow's Shadow: The Motif of the Double in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter" Barton Levi St. Armand—The "Mysteries" of Edgar Poe: The Quest for a Monomyth in Gothic Literature Joseph N. Riddel—The "Crypt" of Edgar Allan Poe J. Gerald Kennedy—Phantasms of Death in Poe's Fiction John Carlos Rowe—Poe, Antebellum Slavery, and Modern Criticism Terence Whalen—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