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The Tell-Tale Heart

Edgar Allan Poe · 1843

Poe's short story told by an unreliable narrator who murders an old man and is undone by imagined guilt.

Poe wrote this story, a key example of his psychological horror and unreliable narration.

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Scanned magazine page headed 'The Tell-Tale Heart' by Edgar A. Poe, with a page number 29 and running head 'The Tell-Tale Heart'. The page also contains a poem titled 'Longing' by W. W. Story above it. The printed text of Poe's story fills the lower columns.
Edgar Allan Poe, "The Tell-Tale Heart", The Pioneer, Vol. I, No. I, January 1843.

About this source

What it is

"The Tell-Tale Heart" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in January 1843 in The Pioneer magazine. It is narrated by an unnamed character who insists on their sanity while describing a murder they committed.

Why it matters

The story is one of Poe's best-known works and a classic example of Gothic fiction. Its first-person, unreliable narration shows Poe's skill at building psychological tension and his interest in guilt, madness and perception. It reflects Poe's working life as a magazine writer in Philadelphia in the early 1840s.

Look closer

  • Why does the narrator insist so strongly on being sane, and what does that suggest about their state of mind?
  • How does Poe use sound (the heartbeat) to build tension instead of showing violence directly?
  • What details about the old man and the narrator's relationship are left unclear, and why might Poe have left them out?

This book is part of the curated material that grounds the AI version of Edgar Allan Poe on Humy.ai — when students ask about related events, the AI can quote it and cite it.

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