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plausible narrative (“The Balloon Hoax”), he embraced strict verisimilitude, extrapolating from scientific data to chronicle an imagined flight across the Atlantic. In “MS. Found in a Bottle” he traced an incredible voyage toward an immense vortex at the South Pole, and in his only full-length novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, he incorporated (and plagiarized) scientific observations by actual South Sea explorers to “authenticate” a fantastic account of the polar region. Such scientific hoaxes as “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” illustrate his credo that “the most vitally important point in fiction” is that of “earnestness or verisimilitude.” Poe used the semblance of reality to mystify his reader, serving up palpable fiction as positive fact. His fascination with criminology and investigative ratiocination, already apparent in “The Man of the Crowd,” yielded a trio of Parisian crime tales featuring C. August Dupin. Exercises in rational analysis also figure in “A Descent into the Maelström,” “The Gold-Bug,” and “The Oblong Box.”

Although often associated with Gothic tales of terror, Poe devoted roughly half of his fiction to humor, producing satires, burlesques, parodies, and spoofs. Several of these pieces now seem too silly, affected, or topical to engage modern readers, and a handful appear to be dashed off for the sake of money alone. But certain comic narratives cleverly lampoon the sensational tale as popularized in Blackwood’s Magazine, and other farces mock national myths and illusions. Even supposedly serious tales include grimly comic touches: Poe’s love of jokes and puns gives manic hilarity to “The Cask of Amontillado,” and a similar sardonic humor animates “Hop-Frog,” while “The Premature Burial” ends with an unexpected joke on the reader.

During the first decade of his magazine career, Poe devoted himself almost exclusively to foreign subjects: predicaments or conflicts grounded in Old World places—Venice, London, Paris, and other locales vaguely European. Nearly all of his greatest tales—such as “Ligeia,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” or “William Wilson”—impute to foreign settings a strangeness that supplements the uncanny effect of narrative events. From “Metzengerstein” through “The Masque of the Red Death” and “The Pit and the Pendulum,” Poe portrayed a distinctly imaginary Europe marked by decadence, rivalry, tyranny, and corruption—by the very evils from which the young republic naively supposed itself liberated. But by the early 1840s, literary nationalism had made American subjects and materials nearly obligatory, and beginning with “The Gold-Bug,” set in South Carolina, Poe pragmatically shifted his fiction toward domestic scenes and situations. Yet he refused to rewrite history for the sake of American mythmaking and argued defiantly that national literature was a contradiction in terms. Convinced that “the world at large [is] the true audience of the author,” Poe continued to prefer foreign themes and crafted several late European tales—such as “The Cask of Amontillado”—dramatizing universal human passions.

Predicaments

In an 1838 satire (“How to Write a Blackwood Article”) Poe mocked the formula for sensation that he used in his own magazine writing. His fictional “Mr. Blackwood” advises an aspiring author: “Get yourself into such a scrape as no one ever got into before” and then “pay minute attention to the sensations.” In the sequel, a would-be writer, Psyche Zenobia, climbs a clock tower, gets her head stuck in a narrow opening, and suffers decapitation by the clock’s “scimitar-like minute-hand,” but in Poe’s farce this predicament poses no obstacle whatsoever to the narrator’s talking head, which prattles on about the plight of her headless torso. The plot carries to absurdity a premise crucial to Poe’s sensationalism: No subject rivets an audience more than impending death by natural force or human contrivance.

Repeatedly, Poe conjured different scenarios of annihilation, sometimes dramatizing the spectacle of death, sometimes allowing horrified victims a last-second