Tell Tale Heart

In Edgar Allan Poe’s short-story, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the speaker of the story tries to convince the reader that he is not mad. But by the speaker telling the story as he does, he answers his own question that he asks the reader at the start of the story, “...why will you say I am mad?” ( Introduction to Literature, page 415). He attempts to tell his story in a calm manner, but as he describes …

…with an unapproachable child-bride, a brilliant editor and low salaried hack, a world renowned but impoverish author, a temperate man and uncontrollable alcoholic, a materialist who yearned for a final union with God. His fevered imagination brought him to great heights of creativity and the depths of paranoiac despair. Yet although he produced a relatively small volume of work, he virtually invented the horror and detective genres and his literary legacy endures to this day.