The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales — Edgar Allan Poe

Enter the dark worlds created by Edgar Allen Poe in the collection "The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales." Poe emphasizes morbidity and death through his tales and poems, and this anthology holds all of Poe's best and most famous works from throughout his career. In "The Fall of the House of Usher," a man and his sister suffer from a strange, debilitating illness. Her death drives him to the point of madness, and the fragile mansion falls along with the Usher family line. It is Poe's most famous and well-known story and is a masterpiece of the Gothic literature genre, demonstrating a prime example of the author's emotional tone and evoking fear, guilt, and trepidation. These same feelings are conjured in the rest of "The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales." "The Tell-Tale Heart" shows how even the most calculating of murders can result in immeasurable guilt. Following the theme of murder, a narrator lures a drunken man to his death in the depths of Italy's cellars in "The Cask of Amontillado." For the reader who wants to experience the mystery and macabre nature of early American literature, "The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales" is the perfect book to choose.