THE CASK OF Amontillado by Edgar All an Poe (1809-1849), was first published
in the November, 1846, number of Godey's Lady's Book. Poe's first collection
of short stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, had appeared in 1840.
"The Cask of Amontillado," as Edmund Clarence Stedman has said, "paints with a
few strokes all that has been conceived of Roman pride and vengeance." It is a
story in Poe's most characteristic manner, and unites, as perhaps no other one
of his fictions does, both his chief merits and his particular defects, though
the latter are by no means in the ascendant. Poe's name will doubtless be ever
intimately associated with the progress of the short story. He was in many
respects an innovator. In view of the fact that Prosper Mérimée
published some of his best short stories in 1829, however, neither Poe nor
Hawthorne can justly be called the father of the modern short story. Yet in
that realm of Terror and Unreason which Poe made peculiarly his own, he may
still be accounted the greatest if not the first. An interesting comparison
may be made between Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" and Balzac's "La Grande
Bretèche"; both are based on somewhat similar situations.
Among the best of Poe's stories may be mentioned: "MS. Found in a Bottle"
(1833), "The Assignation" (1835), "Ligeia" (1838), "The Fall of the House
of Usher" (1839), "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), "A Descent into
the Maelstrom" (1841), "The Masque of the Red Death" (1842), "Eleonora" (1842),
"The Pit and the Pendulum" (1843), "The Gold-Bug" (1843), "The Black Cat"
(1843), "The Purloined Letter" (1845), and "The Cask of Amontillado" (1846).
