These 55 free Edgar Allan Poe books collect his tales, poems and anthologies in one place, all in PDF. Poe was born in Boston in 1809 and died in Baltimore at forty, and in between he wrote the darkest fiction American Romanticism produced.
His range is wider than his reputation suggests. He wrote the Gothic fiction everyone remembers, and he also invented the modern detective story with The Murders in the Rue Morgue.
His detective C. Auguste Dupin handed Arthur Conan Doyle the blueprint for Sherlock Holmes almost fifty years early. Pick a section below and download any title free, or browse our wider collection of short stories when you finish.
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Horror
Edgar Allan Poe Horror and Gothic Short Stories
These free Edgar Allan Poe books are the Gothic fiction that built his reputation. Each tale puts you inside the head of a narrator losing his grip, where the horror comes from guilt and obsession rather than monsters.
A scholar obsessed with his cousin's teeth tells you exactly how far a fixation can go. One of Poe's earliest and most disturbing studies of obsession, and still one of his hardest to shake.
A narrator promises never to love again after his cousin dies, then finds out what that promise costs. Gentler than most Poe, and one of the few of his tales that lets grief end somewhere hopeful.
A wife dies in childbirth and her daughter grows into something too familiar. A short, cold study of identity and inheritance that sets up much of Poe's later work.
A drunk narrator explains, very reasonably, how he came to wall up his own conscience. Alongside The Tell-Tale Heart, this is Poe at his most quotable on guilt.
The most perfectly built revenge story in English. Montresor walks Fortunato into the catacombs over a cask of wine, and the whole thing takes about twenty minutes to read.
Roderick Usher, his sister Madeline, and a house that is not entirely separate from either of them. The single best entry point to Poe's gothic, and the tale most often set for study.
Prince Prospero locks a thousand friends inside an abbey to wait out a plague. The most visually staged thing Poe ever wrote, and the ending arrives on time.
A prisoner of the Inquisition maps his cell in total darkness while the room keeps changing. Pure sustained dread with almost no plot, which is exactly the point.
Eight pages, one murderer, one insistence that he is not mad. If you read only one Poe story, read this one and you will know whether the rest is for you.
A man is followed through school, university and Europe by someone who shares his name, his face and his birthday. Poe's clearest treatment of the double, and a direct ancestor of every doppelganger story since.
Seven revellers sit with a corpse during a plague and something speaks from the darkness. Very short, very strange, and one of the few Poe pieces written to be read aloud.
Poe invented the modern detective story here, and these tales are where the form begins. C. Auguste Dupin solves three of them by pure detective logic, and every fictional detective since, Sherlock Holmes included, owes him something.
The story that invented the detective. C. Auguste Dupin solves an impossible locked-room killing by reasoning alone, and every fictional detective since has worked from this template.
Dupin solves a real murder. Poe took the unsolved killing of a New York shop girl, moved it to Paris, and reasoned toward an answer while the actual case was still open.
A cipher, a buried treasure, and the most popular thing Poe published in his lifetime. It also did more than any other story to make cryptography a public fascination.
A convalescent watches a London street and then follows one old man for a full day and night. The first modern story about the city itself, and a favourite of anyone studying urban writing.
A narrator on a coastal packet ship becomes convinced he knows what is in a fellow passenger's crate. Mystery, seamanship and grief, resolved in a single scene.
Poe's poems are built for the ear as much as the eye. Read The Raven or The Bells out loud once and you will understand why these works have never left the language.
Four movements of bells, from silver sleigh bells to iron funeral bells, built almost entirely out of sound. Read it out loud once and the technique becomes obvious.
A funeral, a bitter fiancé, and an argument over whether the mourners have any right to grieve. An early sketch of the loss that would become The Raven.
A poem about a beautiful palace whose windows go wrong, embedded inside The Fall of the House of Usher as Roderick's song. It works alone and it works as a map of his mind.
Every poem Poe finished, in one file. The Raven, Annabel Lee, The Bells, Ulalume and the early long poems, with the fragments and variants that usually get left out.
Edgar Allan Poe Adventure and Science Fiction Books
This is the Poe most readers never meet. Sea voyages, a balloon flight to the moon, his only finished novel about a stowaway, and comedy dark enough to pass for horror.
Poe's only finished novel. A stowaway survives mutiny, shipwreck and worse on the way to the Antarctic, and the ending has been argued over for a hundred and eighty years.
A bankrupt bellows-mender builds a balloon and flies it to the moon, with the engineering worked out in earnest. Early science fiction, played half straight and half for laughs.
Poe's unfinished novel of an expedition up the Missouri, written so convincingly that a Senate report cited it as fact. The frontier Poe, which almost nobody has read.
A moral tale with the moral attached, in which a man's careless figure of speech is taken literally. Poe answering critics who said his work had no moral.
A visitor tours a private asylum famous for its gentle methods and slowly works out who is running the place. Comedy that turns while you are reading it.
A woman climbs into a cathedral clock tower to enjoy the view and the minute hand reaches her neck. Poe parodying the magazine horror of his day, including his own.
Two spirits talk about how a word, once spoken, keeps moving through the universe forever. Three pages of Poe's cosmology, and a companion piece to Eureka.
Full anthologies in a single file, for readers who want everything at once. These eight downloads hold hundreds of pages of Poe's tales, poems and his cosmological essay Eureka.
Every story in one download, from the Dupin cases to the gothic tales to the satires. The file to take if you would rather have all of Poe at once than pick titles one at a time.
Poe's first collection of stories, gathering twenty-five tales including Ligeia, Morella and Metzengerstein. The book where he first argued that terror comes from the soul.
Poe's cosmology, written the year before he died and dedicated to the few who would take it seriously. He describes an expanding universe from a single origin, decades before anyone could test it.
The opening volume of the collected works, with an appreciation of Poe, the account of his death, and tales including The Gold-Bug and Hans Pfaall. Clean typesetting and a full table of contents.
The second collected volume, opening with The Purloined Letter and running through A Descent into the Maelström and the Scheherazade tale. Good reading copy with selectable text throughout.
The volume that carries The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym in full, chapter by chapter, with its introductory note. The most convenient way to read the novel.
The fourth volume, collecting the comic and satirical tales including The Devil in the Belfry, Lionizing and The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether. The funny Poe, gathered in one place.
The final volume, with The Sphinx, Hop-Frog, The Man of the Crowd and the Philosophy of Furniture. The best single volume for the pieces that get left out of anthologies.
Poe sold most of these works to magazines for a few dollars each and died broke. A century and a half later, half of modern horror and every detective novel still carry his fingerprints.
All 55 files are free to download and share. If Poe is new to you, The Tell-Tale Heart takes eight pages, and you can find more names like his in our classic authors collection.
