The Portable Edgar Allan Poe

The first new edition of this landmark anthology since 1945, The Portable Edgar Allan Poe presents a more complicated, perverse, and cultur ally engaged Poe. Once perceived as a writer profoundly detached from time and place, the most otherworldly of early American authors, Poe emerges, through the texts collected and annotated here, as a figure alive to the controversies of American culture but also determined to defy convention, shock his readers, confound his critics, and resist the pressures of literary nationalism through haunting depictions of primal ordeals. Along with Poe's familiar masterworks in poetry and fiction, The Portable Edgar Allan Poe includes a selection of satirical tales and a suggestive sampling of Poe's letters.