American Gothic Stories

American Gothic remains an enduringly popular genre, retaining its chilling hold on the imagination. This comprehensive anthology brings together the best and most significant stories from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Included here are key tales from early Gothic writers Charles Brockden Brown, Richard Henry Dana, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, who explored themes and anxieties such as religion, guilt, racial tension, nature and wilderness, madness and the irrational. Themes that were developed in later works of such notable writers as Herman Melville, Stephen Crane, Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, Charles W. Chesnutt and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, culminating in the modern gothic–inspired stories of Henry James, Edith Wharton and H.P. Lovecraft.

Arranged chronologically this outstanding collection of unsettling tales showcases those great writers who used Gothic literature to explore a darker side to the American imagination.