h recognition from his poems. The year of 1845 was a lucky year for Poe. He published a collection of his tales and an edition of his poems named The Raven and Other Poems. He then became the editor of the weekly Broadway Journal. In January of 1848, sadness struck Poe. His wife Virginia had died of a sickness she had been battling for months. Poe quickly sunk deeper and deeper into depression and began drinking heavily. After delivering a lecture in Richmond, Poe went back to Baltimore. He was found semiconscious on the streets. No one had known what he had been doing previous this incident. He never recovered, and died on Sunday morning, October 7th, in Washington College Hospital.The general types of works that Edgar Allen Poe wrote were mainly short stories and some poems. Poe was the first writer to recognize that the short story was a different kind of fiction than the novel and the first to insist that, for a story to have a powerful effect on the reader, every single detail in the story should contribute to that effect (Magill 1643). Two of Poe’s stories that I enjoy the most are The Fall of the House of Usher and The Tell-Tale Heart. The Fall of the House of Usher was a short story published in 1839. It is often said that this story is Poe’s best known and most popular story. In this story, the narrator visits his insane friend, Roderick Usher. Usher’s house is huge and gloomy. His twin sister, Madeline, gets sick and dies. The narrator and Usher place her in a tomb in the basement of Usher’s house. What they do not realize is that she is still barely alive. Usher keeps hearing sounds over the next couple of days. The seventh day after Madeline’s death, a bad storm appears. The narrator and Usher open the door of the narrator’s room and Madeline falls on Usher. They both end up dying. The narrator then leaves the house. As he rides away, the house collapses to the ground.The Tell-Tale Heart w...
