This carefully edited collection has been designed and formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. This edition presents to you Edgar Allan Poe's greatest gothic & horror stories. His most recurring themes deal with questions of death, including its physical signs, the effects of decomposition, concerns of premature burial, the reanimation of the dead and mourning. Metzengerstein The Assignation Berenice Morella King Pest Shadow Silence Ligeia The Fall of the House of Usher William Wilson The Man of the Crowd The Oval Portrait The Masque of the Red Death The Pit and the Pendulum The Tell-Tale Heart The Black Cat The Premature Burial The Oblong Box The Imp of the Perverse The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar The Cask of Amontillado Hop-Frog Biography: The Dreamer by Mary Newton Stanard Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was an American writer, editor, and literary critic, best known for his poetry and short stories of mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States and American literature as a whole, and he was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story.