The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (Penguin Classics)

The Portable Edgar Allan Poe compiles Poe's greatest writings: tales of fantasy, terror, death, revenge, murder, and mystery, including "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Masque of the Red Death," and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," the world's first detective story. In addition, this volume offers letters, articles, criticism, visionary poetry, and a selection of random "opinions" on fancy and the imagination, music and poetry, intuition and sundry other topics.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, USA, in 1809. Poe, short story writer, editor and critic, he is best known for his macabre tales and as the progenitor of the detective story. He died in 1849, in mysterious circumstances, at the age of forty.

J. Gerald Kennedy is Boyd Professor of English Emeritus at Louisiana State University and a past president of the Poe Studies Association. His books on Poe include Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing (1987), “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” and the Abyss of Interpretation (1995), and several edited volumes including A Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe (2001), Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race (2001; with Liliane Weissberg), and Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture (2012; with Jerome McGann). His major contribution to American literary studies is Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of Poe (2016), written with the support of fellowships by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has also published Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity (1993), and he edited the Penguin Classics edition of The Life of Black Hawk (2008). He has appeared in many Poe documentary films, including The Mystery of Edgar Allan Poe (1994) for the A&E Biography series and Eric Stange’s film for the PBS American Masterpiece series, Edgar A. Poe: Buried Alive (2017).