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For Halloween, this is the full post of the story. This is a full text version in HTML for the short story by Edgar Allan Poe titled “The Cask of Amontillado”. I consider it one of his best stories. The story is set in a nameless Italian city in an unspecified year and is about the narrator’s deadly revenge on a friend whom he believes has insulted him. Like several of Poe’s stories, and in keeping with the 19th-century fascination with the subject, the narrative revolves around a person being buried alive-in this case, by immurement. What is Immurement? Immurement...

"Lisa, that wasn't scary, even for a poem!" Bart Simpson complains after his sister reads Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" in a classic Halloween episode. "Well, it was written in 1845!" Lisa says. "Maybe people were easier to scare back then!" Jaded cartoon kids aside, Poe still does scare people — even 200 years after his birth. His tales of gothic horror and grisly murder retain their grip on the imagination. His sad, short life and mysterious death feed his legend. Even the daguerreotypes of a pallid, death-haunted Poe burnish his image as a master of the macabre, a man...

As the bicentenary of Edgar Allan Poe is celebrated, fans should be thanking him for his invention of the modern detective genre, writes crime fiction author Andrew Taylor. Bestseller lists and library lending figures tell the same story - crime and detective stories are more popular than ever, and their success has spilled over into film and TV drama. It's remarkable how many of the genre's classic elements can be traced back to the feverishly fertile imagination of one man, Edgar Allan Poe. Once you start looking, the clues are everywhere. Born 200 years ago, on 19 January 1809, Poe...

Edgar Allan Poe reaches his second century mark today. The young United States was a strange place for literary genius to develop, and Poe’s career was relatively short (he died at 40, on Oct. 7, 1849), but through his works he inspired generations of writers throughout the world, and there has been no letup in the 21st century.

Only four mourners attended his funeral in Baltimore, along with an Episcopal minister, the gravedigger and the sexton. The minister, a distant relation of the deceased, decided not to deliver a sermon to such a small gathering. The grave itself sat unmarked for 25 years. As if fate itself conspired to accentuate the void in the death of Edgar Allan Poe, 15 years after the burial, a train derailed into a quarry and destroyed the stone that was finally being constructed for the grave. The tablet read Hic Tandem Felicis Conduntur, "Here At Last He Is Happy". Edgar Poe (the...

The Poe Toaster E.A. Poe Society of BaltimoreSince 1949, on the night of the anniversary of Poe's birth, a mysterious stranger has entered this cemetery and left as tribute a partial bottle of cognac and three roses on Poe's grave. The identity of the stranger, referred to affectionately as the Poe Toaster, is unknown. The significance of cognac is uncertain as it does not feature in Poe's works as would, for example, amontillado. The presumption for the three roses is that it represents the three persons whose remains are beneath the monument: Poe, his mother-in-law (Maria Clemm) and his...