the tell tale heart by edgar allan poe story

The way the story is written, you can see the narrator slowly self-destructing starting by insisting that they are innocent and sane.

The narrator is genderless though most people assume he’s a man, it could just as easily been a woman. The story uses an unreliable narrator very effectively driving the story without giving too much away, to keep it tense. The murder was cold, calculated and well executed, the body disposed but the guilt slowly eats away at the person.

The Tell-Tale Heart is a story about an unnamed person who insists on their sanity after murdering an old man with an evil eye. Early poetic verses found written in a young Poe’s handwriting on the backs of Allan’s ledger sheets reveal how little interest Poe had in the tobacco business. Allan would rear Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe had dreams of being a writer in emulation of his childhood hero the British poet Lord Byron. Within three years of Poe’s birth both of his parents had died, and he was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia while Poe’s siblings went to live with other families. His other brother William Henry Leonard Poe would also become a poet before his early death, and Poe’s sister Rosalie Poe would grow up to teach penmanship at a Richmond girls’ school. The real Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston on January 19, 1809. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame the author’s name.

He is seen as a morbid, mysterious figure lurking in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or crumbling castles. Just as the bizarre characters in Poe’s stories have captured the public imagination so too has Poe himself. Poe’s reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry. He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the science fiction genre, but he made his living as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. This versatile writer’s oeuvre includes short stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a book of scientific theory, and hundreds of essays and book reviews. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, and The Fall of the House of Usher. The name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead.

The tell tale heart by edgar allan poe story