SOURCE: Philippon, Daniel J. “Poe in the Ragged Mountains: Environmental History and Romantic Aesthetics.” Southern Literary Journal 30, no. 2 (spring 1998): 1-16.

In the following essay, Philippon considers whether Poe based his story “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” on the extant Ragged Mountains in Virginia and that “the discrepancy between the actual Ragged Mountains and the fanciful landscape his protagonist envisions is crucial to a complete understanding of the story.”

A later work, written at the same time as some of his best-known tales of horror and ratiocination—such as “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Gold-Bug,” “The Black Cat,” “The Premature Burial,” and “The Purloined Letter”—“A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” (1844) has never been considered one of Edgar Allan Poe's more successful stories. As Doris V. Falk has noted, the plot seems to be “deliberately obscure, full of multifarious Romantic-Gothic elements which never quite cohere,” and as a result...