Great Short Works of Edgar Allan Poe Edited by G.R. Thompson is a 558-page paperback, A Perennial Classic, published by Harper & Row, 1970.  There is a crease along the front cover and an old price stamp to the front page.  Light tanning to the pages.  Binding is sound but may be dry due to age.

Book Summary

"We need a new way of reading Poe, a way just as informed as the new readings of Mark Twain and Herman Melville, which in the last few decades have saved their work from consignment to the adolescent's bookshelf.  We must divorce ourselves from the traditional Gothicist view of Poe....Almost everything that Poe wrote is qualified by, indeed controlled by, a prevailing irony in which the artist presents us with slyly insinuated mockery of both ourselves as readers and himself as writer.  The view of art (and life) informing both the tales and the poems, and to an extent the criticism...ambivalently and ironically explored the fads of the Romantic age.  All of Poe's fiction, and the poems as well, can be seen as one coherent piece--as the work of one of the greatest ironists of world literature.

"The present anthology includes works which represent the range of Poe's imagination, from the best of his comic and satiric works to the best of his Gothic works....The fundamental ironic and skeptical consistency informing the seemingly diverse performance collected here is a remarkable literary achievement--perhaps one of the most remarkable of the nineteenth century."  --G.R. Thompson, from the Introduction.

ISBN:  0-06-083093-X