Tales of Mystery and Imagination

Description

This collection of Poe's work contains some of the most exciting and haunting stories ever written. They range from the poetic to the mysterious to the darkly comic, yet all possess the genius for the grotesque that defines Poe's writing. They are peopled with neurotics and social outcasts, obsessed with nameless terrors or preoccupied with seemingly unsolvable mysteries. 'The Tell-Tale Heart' and 'The Fall of the House of Usher' are key works in the horror canon, while in 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' and 'The Mystery of Marie Roget' we find the origins of modern detective fiction. Collectively, these tales represent the best of Edgar Allan Poe's prose work before his premature death in 1849. This Macmillan Collector's Library edition features an afterword by Jonty Claypole. Designed to appeal to the booklover, Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautifully bound hardback gift editions of much loved classic titles. Bound in real cloth, printed on high quality paper, and featuring ribbon markers and gilt edges, Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston in 1809. Orphaned by the age of three, he was raised by John Allan, a prosperous Virginian merchant. Poe published his first volume of poetry while still a teenager. He worked as an editor for magazines in Philadelphia, Richmond and New York, and was a respected literary critic. In 1836 he married his thirteen year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm, whose illness and early death in 1847 is believed to have inspired much of her husband's work. It was only with the publication of his poem 'The Raven' in 1845 that Poe achieved national fame as a writer He died suddenly and mysteriously in 1849, aged just forty.