Description

The dead rise from their graves and a house inexplicably takes on a frightening life of its own in Poe’s chilling 1839 story The Fall of the House of Usher. An urgent letter summons a man to the home of a friend and his twin sister. Upon arrival, our narrator finds that both Usher siblings—Roderick and Madeline—are seriously ill. Trying to comfort them, the narrator trades stories with Roderick and listens to his unusual and eerie music. Tragically, Roderick informs the narrator one day that Madeline has died and insists that she be buried immediately. Not questioning his friend’s extreme haste, the narrator helps his friend to lay Madeline to rest. Neither man is able to shake a strange feeling that seems to pervade the entire house, however. Then, on a stormy night, they see a mysterious light emanating from the ground around them. The narrator tries to calm Usher’s fears, but as the reader soon finds, there will be no peace until after the shocking conclusion of this tale—celebrated as one of the greatest works of gothic fiction ever written.

About the Author

Soon after his birth in Boston, Massachusetts, Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849) lost both of his parents. The young Poe went to live with a couple from Virginia, where he went to school and eventually to college. Poe only briefly attended university before dropping out to embark on a short-lived stint in the military. While still quite young, Poe published his first book of poems, Tamerlane, and discovered that in writing, he had found direction for his life. Poe began to produce short stories and non-fiction prose for various publications in New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. Over the years, his work enjoyed increasing popularity. In the 1830s, Poe wrote many of his most famous works, including some of the very first examples of detective fiction, a genre that he is credited with inventing. His gothic tales of murder and mystery, among them The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, The Tell-Tale Heart, and The Masque of the Red Death, thrilled readers in America and Europe. Poe’s poetry was also well received in his lifetime, and he published what is perhaps his most famous poem, The Raven, in 1845. Almost as if it was a strange tale of his own making, Poe’s untimely death continues to be the subject of much speculation to this day. In the middle of the night in October of 1849, Poe was found wandering the streets of Baltimore in a delirious and weakened state. Wearing clothes that did not belong to him and calling out to an unidentified person named “Reynolds,” Poe died in a Baltimore hospital a few days later. Poe’s legend lives on today, with readers all over the world delighting in his enigmatic and haunting tales and devoted fans regularly paying their respects at his gravesite in Baltimore.

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Opening Lines (Experimental)

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view ...