Edgar Allan Poe

The 12 books by and about Edgar Allan Poe on this CD include the five-volume Raven collection of his works.

Intended for use with PCs (Windows or Linux) and recent Macs (OS X), these books are in plain-text format, organized for easy access.

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Complete Table of Contents:

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Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

• Volume 1 of the Raven Edition of his works
• Edgar Allan Poe, An Appreciation
• Life of Poe, by James Russell Lowell
• Death of Poe, by N. P. Willis
• The Unparalled Adventures of One Hans Pfall
• The Gold Bug
• Four Beasts in One
• The Murders in the Rue Morgue
• The Mystery of Marie Roget
• The Balloon Hoax
• MS. Found in a Bottle
• The Oval Portrait
• Volume 2
• The Purloined Letter
• The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherezade
• A Descent into the Maelström
• Von Kempelen and his Discovery
• Mesmeric Revelation
• The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
• The Black Cat
• The Fall of the House of Usher
• Silence -- a Fable
• The Masque of the Red Death
• The Cask of Amontillado
• The Imp of the Perverse
• The Island of the Fay
• The Assignation
• The Pit and the Pendulum
• The Premature Burial
• The Domain of Arnheim
• Landor's Cottage
• William Wilson
• The Tell-Tale Heart
• Berenice
• Eleonora
• Volume 3
• Narrative of A. Gordon Pym
• Ligeia
• Morella
• A Tale of the Ragged Mountains
• The Spectacles
• King Pest
• Three Sundays in a Week
• Volume 4
• The Devil in the Belfry
• Lionizing
• X-ing a Paragrab
• Metzengerstein
• The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether
• How to Write a Blackwood article
• A Predicament
• Mystification
• Diddling
• The Angel of the Odd
• Mellonta Tauta
• The Duc de l'Omelette
• The Oblong Box
• Loss of Breath
• The Man That Was Used Up
• The Business Man
• The Landscape Garden
• Maelzel's Chess-Player
• The Power of Words
• The Colloquy of Monas and Una
• The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion
• Shadow.--A Parable
• Volume 5
• Philosophy of Furniture
• A Tale of Jerusalem
• The Sphinx
• Hop Frog
• The Man of the Crowd
• Never Bet the Devil Your Head
• Thou Art the Man
• Why the Little Frenchman Wears his Hand in a Sling
• Bon-Bon
• Some words with a Mummy
• Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe edited by John Ingram
• Eureka: a Prose Poem
• The Fall of the House of Usher (story)
• Selections from Poe edited by J. Montgomery Gambrill
• Poe in French translation
• Le Corbeau = The Raven, translated to French by Stephane Mallarme
• Dernier Contes, translated to French by F. Rabbe
• Histoires Extraordinaires, translated by Charles Baudelaire
• About Poe
• The Dreamer, a Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe by Mary Newton Stanard
• Edgar Allan Poe by R.W. Griswold, in The International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Volume 1, October 1 1850, No. 3

Regarding Poe's prose poem Eureka:

The first reference I saw to "Eureka" was in "Parallel Worlds" by Michio Kaku ("professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York and cofounder of string field theory") p. 28:

"Similarly, one might suppose that the farther a star is, the fainter it is.  This is true, but this also cannot be the answer.  If we look at a portion of the night sky, the very distant stars are indeed faint, but there are also more stars the farther you look.  These two effects would exactly cancel in a uniform universe, leaving the night sky white. (This is because the intensity of starlight decreases as the square of the distance, which is canceled by the fact that the number of stars goes up as the square of the distance.)

"Oddly enough, the first person in history to solve the paradox as the American mystery writer Edgar Allan Poe, who had a long-term interest in astronomy.  Just before he died, he published many of his observations in a rambling, philosophical poem called Eureka: A Prose Poem.  In a remarkable passage, he wrote:

"'Were the succession of stars endless, then the background of the sky would present us an uniform luminosity, like that displayed by the Galaxy -- since there could be absolutely no point, in all that background, at which would not exist a star.  The only mode, therefore, in which, under such a state of affairs, we could comprehend the voids which our telescopes find in innumerable directions, would be by supposing that the distance of the invisible background [is] so immense that no ray from it has yet been able to reach us at all.'

"He concluded by noting that the idea 'is by far too beautiful not to possess Truth as its essentiality.'

"This is the key to the correct answer.  The universe is not infinitely old.  There was a Genesis.  There is a finite cutoff to the light that reaches our eye.  Light from the most distant stars has not yet had time to reach us.  cosmologist Edward Harrison, who was the first to discover that Poe ahd solved Olbers' paradox, has written, 'When I first read Poe's words I was astounded:  How could a poet, at best an amateur scientist, have perceived the right explanation 40 years ago when in our colleges the wrong explanation... is still being taught.'"

I was surprised to discover that "Eureka" is not included in the 5 volume Raven edition of Poe's works and also does not appear in Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe by John Ingram.

I eventually found it at the Web site of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore http://www.eapoe.org/works/index.htm That's a great resource for Poe fans.

According to the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore Eureka was published around August 1848. "The number of copies printed is uncertain. Although Poe dearly wanted an edition of 50,000 copies, apparently only 500 were printed."

According to Wikipedia:
"Eureka, an essay written in 1848, included a cosmological theory that anticipated black holes and the big bang theory by 80 years, as well as the first plausible solution to Olbers' paradox. Though described as a "prose poem" by Poe, who wished it to be considered as art, this work is a remarkable scientific and mystical essay unlike any of his other works. He wrote that he considered Eureka to be his career masterpiece.

"Poe eschewed the scientific method in his Eureka. He argued that he wrote from pure intuition, not the Aristotelian a priori method of axioms and syllogisms, nor the empirical method of modern science set forth by Francis Bacon. For this reason, he considered it a work of art, not science, but insisted that it was still true. Though some of his assertions have later proven to be false (such as his assertion that gravity must be the strongest force—it is actually the weakest), others have been shown to be surprisingly accurate and decades ahead of their time."