Edgar Allan Poe — “Letter to B——”

Reading copy:

• “Letter to B——” — reading copy

Manuscripts and Authorized Printings:

• Text-01 — “Letter To Mr. — ——” — 1831, no original manuscript or fragments are known to exist (but this version is presumably recorded in Text-02)
• Text-02 — “Letter To Mr. — ——” — 1831 — POEMS
• Text-03 — “Letter to B——” — July 1836 — Southern Literary Messenger (For Griswold’s 1856 reprint of this text, see the entry under reprints, below.)

Reprints:

• “Letter to B——” — 1856 — Works — Griswold merely reprints Text-03
• “Letter to B——” — 1875 — The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. J. H. Ingram, Edinburgh, Adam and Charles Black (3:312-318)
• “Letter to B——” — 1903 — Life and Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 2: Letters, ed. J. A. Harrison, New York: T. Y. Crowell (2:450-457) (Although not strictly a letter, in the sense of correspondence, Harrison includes this literary letter in the appendix.)
• “Letter to B——” — 1909 — Selections from the Critical Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Frederick C. Prescott, New York: Henry Holt and Company (pp. 1-10 and 323-325) (Prescott has apparently reprinted the text from Harrison, including the error of “The Indian Prince . . .”)
• “Letter to Mr. [Elam Bliss]” — 1928 — Selected Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott, New York: Macmillan Company (The Modern Readers’ Series) (pp. 111-118)

Scholarly and Noteworthy Reprints:

• “Letter to B——” — 1894-1895 — The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 10: Poems, eds. E. C. Stedman and G. E. Woodberry, Chicago: Stone and Kimball (10:144-153)
• “Letter to B——” — 1902 — The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 7: Poems, ed. J. A. Harrison, New York: T. Y. Crowell (7:xxxv-xliii) (Harrison’s text has a very unfortunate typographical error near the end, where “No Indian Prince . . .” is rendered as “The Indian Prince . . .” so that the meaning of the quotation is inverted and Poe’s purpose in giving it entirely undermined.)
• “Letter to B——” — 1984 — Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson, New York: Library of America (pp. 5-12)
• “Letter to Mr. — —” — 1984 — Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales, Patrick F. Quinn (New York: Library of America), pp. 10-17 (the version from Poems­, 1831)
• “Letter to B——” — 2009 — Edgar Allan Poe: Critical Theory, Stuart and Susan F. Levine, eds., Chicago: University of Illinois Press (pp. 1-19)

Instream Comparative and Study Texts:

• None

Plain Text Files for Juxta:

• None

Miscellaneous Texts and Related Items:

• “Lettre à B——” — June 15, 1897 — La Revue Blanche (Paris) (French translation by Philippe E. Dally, from the Ingram reprint)
• “Letter to Mr. B” — 2007 — Audio book (unabridged), read by Chris Aruffo (part of a 5-CD set)

• Heartman, Charles F. and James R. Canny, A Bibliography of First Printings of the Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, Hattiesburg, MS: The Book Farm, 1943.
• Levine, Stuart and Susan F., eds., Edgar Allan Poe: Critical Theory, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009
• Mabbott, Thomas Ollive, ed., The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe (Vols 2-3 Tales and Sketches), Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978.
• O‘Neill, James, “A Closer Source for the Goths in Poe’s ‘Letter to B——’,” Poe Studies, 1979, 12:19-20