The Tell-Tale Heart

“The Tell-Tale Heart” is one of Edgar Allan Poe’s best-known short stories, first published in The Pioneer in January 1843. It is a work of Gothic horror written from the first-person point of view; like other Poe stories that employ the same narrative style (e.g., "The Black Cat," also published in 1843, or "Berenice," published in 1835), "The Tell-Tale Heart" uses an unreliable narrator to explore obsession, guilt, violence, and the supernatural. It has been adapted multiple times for various media, starting with a 1928 movie of the same name. More recently, it inspired a 2008 short by acclaimed horror filmmaker Robert Eggers as well as an episode of the 2023 Netflix miniseries The Fall of the House of Usher (itself based on a Poe story).

Originally, the story included an epigraph with a stanza from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1838 poem “A Psalm of Life,” subtitled “What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist”:

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,

   And our hearts, though stout and brave,