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The Tell-Tale Heart

In The Tell-Tale Heart the narrator strives to convince the reader of his sanity, while describing a murder he committed. The motivation for murder appears to be the narrator's fixation on the victim's cloudy vulture-eye. After disposing of the body, the narrator calmly entertains (at first) three policemen who come to investigate reports of screaming in the night. First published in 1843 in The Pioneer, a short-lived Boston magazine edited by James Russell Lowell, The Tell-Tale Heart is widely considered a classic of the Gothic fiction genre and is one of Poe's most famous short stories.