Read throughout the world, translated by Baudelaire, and admired by writers as different as Dostoevsky and H. G. Wells, Edgar Allan Poe has become a legendary figure, representing the artist as obsessed outcast and romantic failure. His nightmarish visions, shaped by cool artistic calculation, reveal some of the dark possibilities of human experience. But his enormous popularity and his continuing influence on literature depend less on legend or vision than on his stylistic accomplishments as a writer. All of Poe’s best-known and most representative works are gathered here, as well as his masterly “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.”

LIBRARY OF AMERICA PAPERBACK CLASSICS present authoritative texts drawn from the acclaimed Library of America series and are introduced by today’s most distinguished scholars and writers. Each book features a detailed chronology of the author s life and career, an essay on the choice of the text, and notes.