The Cask of Amontillado

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Edgar Allan Poe, who published this story in 1846, lived a life that was itself full of darkness and misfortune. Born in Boston in 1809, he was orphaned as a young child and raised by a foster family in Virginia. Although he showed extraordinary talent as a writer and poet from an early age, his life was marked by poverty, personal loss, and a troubled relationship with alcohol. He lost several people he loved deeply, including his young wife, Virginia Clemm, who was seriously ill with tuberculosis at the time he wrote The Cask of Amontillado. Poe died in 1849 under mysterious circumstances, aged just forty. In the span of his short life, however, he helped to invent the modern short story and the detective fiction genre, and his work remains as gripping today as it was in the nineteenth century.