<i>The Complete Tales of Edgar Allan Poe</i> is a collection of Poe's greatest prose works. Master of the short story form, Edgar Allan Poe composed tales of terror, horror, death, ruin, murder, and revenge. Many of the sixty-eight tales included in this collection—"The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Black Cat," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Masque of the Red Death," and "The Tell-Tale Heart," for example—have become landmarks of our literature. Poe also wrote the world's first detective story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," which introduced C. Auguste Dupin, the paragon of that now ubiquitous modern character: the thinking man's sleuth. This volume also includes Poe's novella <i>The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym</i>, an unearthly sea adventure replete with shipwrecks, ghastly specters and the eternal lure of the unknown.