The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 2

About this volume

A stolen letter, a dangerously persuasive narrator, a fearful chamber, and an apparently impossible scientific report are among the entrances into this second volume of Poe’s collected works. The stories move between clever reasoning and the breakdown of reason, sometimes asking readers to solve a mystery and sometimes making them doubt the voice that describes it. Each tale creates its own pressure, yet many share a concern with what attention notices, misses, or cannot bear to acknowledge.

The volume places familiar works such as The Black Cat, The Fall of the House of Usher, and The Tell-Tale Heart beside less immediately recognizable experiments in satire, speculation, and description. That variety makes it useful both for a first encounter with Poe and for returning to him beyond a handful of often-reprinted favorites. Readers can move between separate pieces rather than follow one continuous plot, noticing how deliberately the author changes the relationship between atmosphere, explanation, and the unsettling possibility that a mind may become its own most dangerous setting.

Things You May Not Know About The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 2

• A particular collected edition. This is the second volume of the Raven Edition, not a complete single-volume gathering of everything Poe wrote.
• Dupin opens the volume. The Purloined Letter features the investigator C. Auguste Dupin, whose methods connect Poe’s fiction with the early development of detective stories.
• Several famous horror tales are included. The contents bring together The Black Cat, The Fall of the House of Usher, and The Tell-Tale Heart among many others.
• The range includes landscape writing. The Domain of Arnheim and Landor’s Cottage show an interest in designed landscapes that differs from the collection’s more claustrophobic tales.
• Editorial notes have mixed origins. The volume’s redactor explains that some endnotes are Poe’s and others were added by Rufus Wilmot Griswold.