Suffused with a gloom reminiscent of that of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Ligeia” remains one of Edgar Allan Poe’s best-known stories. It achieves Poe’s goal of the “single effect” through the narrator’s focus on Ligeia, his deceased… Read More ›
One of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous “tales of ratiocination” whose emphasis on deductive reasoning became the basis for the modern detective story, The Purloined Letter features Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin, the archetype of the modern fictional detective who always outwits… Read More ›
“The Pit and the Pendulum” first appeared in Edgar Allan Poe’s collection of short stories The Gift in 1843. The story is a terrifying tale of suspense in which Poe captures the horrors of confinement and torture. The main character,… Read More ›
Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is an extension of his gothic tales as well as the first detective fiction, although the word detective had not been coined yet. This story, along with “The Mystery of Marie… Read More ›
Long considered Edgar Allan Poe‘s masterpiece, “The Fall of the House of Usher” continues to intrigue new generations of readers. The story has a tantalizingly horrific appeal, and since its publication in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, scholars, critics, and general readers… Read More ›
The seriocomic tale “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” first appeared in American Review in December 1845 as “The Facts of M. Valdemar’s Case.” The revised tale was reprinted with an introductory note by Poe that noted the… Read More ›
During his life, Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849) was a figure of controversy and so became reasonably well known in literary circles. Two of his works were recognized with prizes: Manuscript Found in a Bottle and The Gold-Bug. The Raven, his most… Read More ›
First published in the Theatre Annual (1887), “The Dualitists,” frequently cited as demonstrating one of Bram Stoker’s favorite themes, male bonding, evokes a world of children’s adventure stories. As in much of Stoker’s fiction, the driving force grows out of… Read More ›
“Jordan’s End,” which first appeared in Ellen Glasgow’s collection The Shadowy Third (1923), shows the influence of Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher” a kinship that Glasgow acknowledged. In Glasgow’s story, the ill-fated Jordan family… Read More ›
“The Stolen Letter” was originally published as “The Fourth Poor Traveller” in The Seven Poor Travellers, the extra Christmas number of Charles Dickens’s Household Words (December 1854). At this time, Wilkie Collins was a protégé of Dickens. The story was… Read More ›
Aestheticism was a 19th-century literary, artistic, and cultural movement influenced by the aesthetic philosophies of the German romantic school, by the art criticism of John Ruskin, and by French writers such as Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire. Aspects of aestheticism… Read More ›
This story was first published in Graham Greene’s debut volume of short stories, The Basement Room (1935). The piece emerged again in 1947 in Nineteen Stories and then again in 1954 in Twenty-One Stories. The Basement Room received a cool… Read More ›
The Pre-Raphaelites were a group of authors in the later 1840s through the close of the 1890s who espoused a distinctive artistic philosophy. In form, Pre-Raphaelite short stories exhibit a highly finished style that refl ects and embodies the aesthetic… Read More ›
“The Blue Cross” appeared in The Storyteller magazine in September 1910 and heralded the first appearance of G. K. Chesterton’s most famous and enduring creation, Father Brown. The story, and the five further stories that followed at monthly intervals, were… Read More ›
Coming after two novellas featuring Sherlock Holmes (A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four), “A Scandal in Bohemia,” a short detective story, first appeared in the Strand magazine in July 1891. It recounts the case of the king… Read More ›
Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961), an American-born author who worked under the penname H. D., did much of her writing while living in London, England. She was initially best known for her poetry despite an abundant corpus of plays and fiction and… Read More ›
One of the most frequently anthologized of Bernard Malamud’s stories, “The Jewbird,” from the 1963 collection Idiots First, with its original blending of magical realism and humor to demonstrate the serious effects of bigotry and hatred, rarely fails to elicit… Read More ›
As part of the modernist imperative to “make it new,” writers of the 1920s and 1930s consistently wreaked havoc with existing genre conventions. “Poems” no longer rhymed and scanned predictably; essays and reviews had a subjective, even idiosyncratic, slant; plays… Read More ›
The Vanishing Red (1916) He is said to have been the last Red Man In Acton. And the Miller is said to have laughed— If you like to call such a sound a laugh. But he gave no one else… Read More ›
In “Death by Landscape,” Margaret Atwood rewrites early American stories about the wilderness from her own trenchant perspective. At the same time, the story finds literary ancestors in Edgar Allan Poe’s detective stories, especially the locked-room mystery (“The Murders in the… Read More ›
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