Poe's fame is universal and his influence on both poetry and prose is immense, and international. He may at first seem an unusual choice for a collection specifically on Southern Gothic. He was born in Boston and spent part of his childhood in England. His landscapes seem projections of dream or nightmare and are usually stripped of local reference. However, he had deep connections with the South, especially Richmond, Virginia, the home of the Allans, his adopted parents. He attended, for a time, the University of Virginia. Recent scholars have stressed Southern and racial themes in his works.

“The Fall of the House of Usher” is a foundational text of the Southern Gothic. The doomed house (in both senses, a physical structure and a family) are found throughout Southern literature, and especially looms after the Civil War, when decaying mansions and a decaying plantation aristocracy could be seen everywhere in the deep South. W. E. B. Du Bois describes these families and houses with a historian's eyes, and they are to be seen in several stories in this collection, as well as in great twentieth-century Gothic novels such as William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! Over all these houses falls the shadow of the Ushers.

Text: Rufus Wilmot Griswold, The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe, 4 vols. (New York: Redfield, 1857).

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was—but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible.