SOURCE: Current-García, Eugene. “Poe's Short Fiction.” In The American Short Story before 1850: A Critical History, pp. 59-83. Boston: Twayne, 1985.

In the following essay, Current-García discusses major thematic and stylistic elements of the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe.

When Edgar Allan Poe died in Baltimore on 7 October 1849 he had written and published, during the preceding twenty years, between seventy and eighty tales and sketches, some of which had been republished, with certain revisions, a number of times in different magazines. Many of his tales and sketches also reappeared in three collections during the last decade of his life: Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, a two-volume collection containing twenty-five pieces, 1840; The Prose Romances of Edgar A. Poe, a small volume containing only “The Murders in the Rue Morge” and “The Man That Was Used Up,” 1843; and Tales, which contained twelve pieces, published in 1845.¹

As in the...